Photo: BOSTON, MA – JANUARY 30: Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard Universitys chemistry and chemical biology department, is released from John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston on Jan. 30, 2020. Federal authorities said Charles Lieber, a prominent nanoscientist and a prolific inventor and entrepreneur, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from his Chinese connections. (Photo by Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
105 Top American Scientists Defect to China
China has lured at least 105 leading American scientists away from U.S. universities and corporations since 2024, a defection wave critics say exposes Beijing’s ambition and the failures of American policy to guard the nation’s intellectual capital.
Nearly half of the past year’s departures work in biotechnology and medicine, a signal the Chinese Communist Party is racing to overtake the United States in medical innovation. Others specialize in space science, climate research, computing and semiconductors.
The scientists are not simply changing employers. They are leaving American institutions, whose taxpayers often funded their research, to join laboratories bankrolled directly by the Chinese Communist Party.
Former Harvard chemistry chair Charles Lieber, convicted in 2021 of lying to federal investigators about his ties to China, resurfaced last year in Shenzhen, where the CCP is bankrolling his effort to build an army of AI enabled super soldiers. Lieber developed the research over three decades at Harvard, work that drew more than $8 million from the Pentagon. He was offered as much as $900,000 in salary and living expenses, plus a sprawling research facility, to make the move.
Other departures raise troubling questions. Biologist Xianzhong Xu returned to China in May, months after four researchers in his University of Michigan lab were arrested for allegedly smuggling biological material, though Xu was not charged. Virologist Haitao Hu left the University of Texas in December for a Chinese Academy of Sciences post leading vaccine research nearly identical to work he once did for the U.S. military. Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi left the University of California, Berkeley, this month for Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Analysts say the trend reflects deliberate strategy in Beijing paired: “Beijing is increasingly betting that paralyzed federal science funding, concerns over immigration status for foreign workers and students at US universities, and its own pool of increasingly cutting-edge researchers will give it an advantage over Washington to lure away the next generation of top researchers,” said Jack Burnham, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ China Program.
Dr. Roberta Shapiro, a Columbia University Medical Center professor, said scientists are also drawn by fewer regulatory hurdles. “There’s more and more interest in what China has been developing. They’re doing heavy recruiting in the US, and there’s an interest among scientists in the US because they have so much more freedom to advance treatments in China as opposed to what we’ve been mired down in regulatory restrictions in this country,” she said.
The FBI has long cautioned that Chinese talent recruitment programs serve Beijing’s military goals. FBI counterintelligence assistant director John Brown told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that Beijing seeks American technology, often in its earliest stages, to “erode our competitive advantage and supplant the United States as a global superpower.”