copying a comment from a hackernews post about the same topic:
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The FBI has been ruthlessly persecuting Chinese people with absolutely absurd charges. For example, “In a grant application you didn’t list that you had met for coffee with X other student from your alma mater when you visited China for Lunar New Year. This constitutes fraud and possibly espionage.” A grant application is not an SSBI application! These are genuinely absurd standards to be applying to people. The fact that the FBI has been overwhelmingly losing these racially motivated cases is cold comfort - having extremely powerful secretive police harassing you and your family is extremely distressing even if their case against you is ultimately unsuccessful, and the fact that they know they’re losing and keep doing it suggests their intent is to try and discourage you from talking to any of your friends or family back in China, or leave the country. Careful what you wish for.
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Declared academic collaboration between academic institutions in the US and China is being cracked down on as well. People and their families are being investigated with no evidence given as to why, the federal government is contacting US universities and convincing them to end collaborative programs, etc. The reasons given, if any, are that the Chinese are stealing American technology through these academic collaborations. Thinking for two seconds about what, exactly, an academic collaboration is intended to accomplish should show how absurd the “stealing” idea is.
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A lot of the most valuable work in academia is collaborative, and a lot of the specific career value in being a Chinese national or having Chinese family ties in US academia is that you can function as an expert go-between for the two largest and most important countries for scientific research. When the US is not just devaluing but actively stigmatising some of your skills, it can force people to choose. The US is richer per capita, has more freedoms in many respects, etc, but the persecution by police is going to impact your assessment of where you’d rather live, especially when the PRC has open arms, lots of grant money, and scientists have a good position in society there too.
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Hate crimes against Chinese people have been increasing dramatically for years. Chinese communities know this and also see very clearly that it’s not a priority for either political party to do anything about it. Not much to say about this, it’s obvious why you wouldn’t want to live somewhere where there are enough people in the population committing hate crimes against you that most people are in community with a victim, and then there’s no political will to do anything about it.
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There’s genuine concern about the possibility of war. If you know anyone in the American military, you know that war with China is on everyone’s mind. Different dates get floated, from 2030 to 2027 to 2025, but it’s essentially received wisdom in the US military that there is going to be a war in the westpac theatre at some point. This view (“We should be prepared”) is also essentially bipartisan in the political realm, and American media are doing their part too. Chinese people notice, they can see the current (illegal, racist) persecution by the government, and most of them have enough historical knowledge to understand that the dynamics that lead to the Japanese internment camps haven’t fundamentally changed - the camps themselves weren’t even ruled to be illegal until 2018, only 5 years ago! If you were Chinese, would you want to stay in America and take the risk that you might end up confined to a camp, or wearing an ankle bracelet with a microphone everywhere just so the government can say that they didn’t put a particular ethnic minority in literal camps? Genuinely, would you take that risk, with what you know about America? If the American government goes to war with China, and they decided on this sort of large scale persecution of Chinese people, do you think that any significant quantity of Americans with any political power would stand up for the Chinese people in America, or would it be like 9/11 where the government persecuted Muslims en masse and there was zero political will to stop them for years?
Love how everyone in the west believes that Chinese people literally cannot comprehend science without Stealing it from them. These are also the same people who discriminate against Asians for “being smarter than anyone else”
“The Russians never invent anything. All they have, they’ve got from others. Everything comes to them from abroad—the engineers, the machine-tools. Give them the most highly perfected bombing-sights. They’re capable of copying them, but not of inventing them. With them, working-technique is simplified to the uttermost. Their rudimentary labour-force compels them to split up the work into a series of gestures that are easy to perform and, of course, require no effort of thought.” - Adolf Hitler
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The most popular rifle in the entire world was designed by whom
Don’t even bother trying that, they’ll just say they copied it from the StG-44. It doesn’t matter that the internals are completely different.
wow an automatic rifle with wooden furnishing huh? Real original slavvy
Love how everyone in the west believes that Chinese people literally cannot comprehend science without Stealing it from them
Modern western society would collapse if they stopped stealing from others / exploiting the rest of the world
Good post and they also forgot another very important point.
Chinese universities and the government are giving extremely good financial incentives for new research and for these researchers one of the primary obstacles in western academia is funding, this is much less of a problem in China. In fact money alone would be a reason for any academic to move to China and I’d encourage everyone to do so for their own career prospects imo regardless of ideology.
Reminds me of the all-hands meetings I had to attend when i worked at a university last year. Legit had to listen to some sanctimonous administrator talk about ensuring that Other Countriestm did not “steal” our researchers. When i later spoke with a coworker about it, I joked that “how dare China pay more and offer better working conditions” and the guy just shrugged and said that he didn’t really think it was a problem per se, but that the University was afraid of how it looked when everyone was looking elsewhere. I then countered by asking if we could maybe somehow hope to match these offers, and he just shrugged again and said that we had no hope for that kind of thing. Shortly after I had to attend a meeting about a new faculty facility that had gone over budget by roughly 250 million dollars, so wouldn’t you know it, we’re broke now.
Legit had to listen to some sanctimonous administrator talk about ensuring that Other Countriestm did not “steal” our researchers.
Oh boy reminds me
I almost want to post this again since while the sinophobia shit is definitely an extremely important factor, it is also not really the only one. Clearly China is the place to be for easy funding and getting shit done.
Also, our economy is going to crash so hard when we go to war, where the fuck are we going to get all our goods? They all talk about derisking from China, but I really haven’t seen any convincing paths forward for that to actually happen
I thought hackernews was a bunch of libertarians
I mean that person probably is still a libertarian, just smarter than your average one
I find them generally tremendously unempathetic people who still feel extremely confident in making grand proclamations about how poor people or people in other countries think and feel.
hackernews isn’t a monolithic group, there exists all sorts of people on there
I mainly remember it for banning a mention of Graeber’s Debt for the crime of overstating the importance of hacker spaces in the early computing industry in Seattle and San Francisco haha (probably actually for critiquing money tho)
lmao love to ban books in my libertarian utopia
Great post, thanks for sharing it here
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it’s 4pm, time for your century of humiliation!yes, honey
de dollarization accelerating
IMF accepts yuan for payments
South America and Africa rejecting US hegemony
BRICS growing stronger
it's happeningholy shit what an powerful emoji
Inb4 Modi fucks up BRICS because China. I’ll literally just move out of india if that happens.
Good, fuck the US. I would hate to be a scientist in the US. What would you even study? How to make diabetics buy Coke?
It’s probably more lucrative for highly educated americans to go into finance than do actually useful things
someone told me once that at least half of the people studying fluid dynamics go on to model the stock market rather than anything scientifically interesting
So many talented/cool mathematicians I went to college with are now just getting boatloads of money being “data analysts/scientists” for consulting firms or startups. It’s really a shame
Yup. I know a couple of people with PhDs in engineering and sciences and the only way for them to pay back their massive student debts is to go work in finance.
Imagine how soul crushing that must be
hahahhahahahHHhHhh its more than that
source: my ass
Finance capital maintaining dominance over industrial capital as the rate of profit declines?
who could’ve predicted this.It is. The average new grad quant (not just the PhDs, even the bachelors’) salary at a top hedge fund is literally more than twice the average tenured math/physics/CS professor salary at a top school (though lots of tenured professors have a ton of lucrative advisory/consultant side hustle positions with corporations)
My friend rides a boat and collects samples in the ocean. She says it gets really depressing because so much climate change data.
There’s this couple of beautiful books by John Steinbeck documenting his ride-along for research trips with his best friend who was a marine biologist, and they sound like the raddest thing you could do. I guess it becomes less fun when everything around you is dying.
I was following the restoration of the boat they sailed on for a while until they stopped posting videos, but it was a cool trip.
Yea
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
can we do it again? 🥺
Smh, nothing but reboots and sequels these days.
Burgerland ideology seems to seriously believe that scientific progress depends on “disruptive innovator” billionaires and not actual fucking scientists. I think that ideology partially drives government (and private corporate) policy, which causes material conditions to worsen enough for actual fucking scientists to leave.
Based on what the people I know in academia/university research have told me, the research landscape I the US/canada is fuuuucked, too. There’s barely any federal/public funding and corporate partnerships where the research is increasingly risk-averse/uncreative are becoming the norm.
In Canada, the typical scholarship that graduate students are expected to fund themselves with haven’t changed in amount for 20 years. It’s been 17.5k/yr for master’s level students, and 20k-35k/yr for PhD students since 2003. In those 20 years, minimum wage has more than doubled in Canada, tuition has more than doubled, rent has tripled or more, faculty wages have doubled, etc… Everything is more expensive, and everyone else is earning more, but we are expected to live on the same 20k/yr as our supervisors did 20 years (which is now well below the Canadian poverty line, and that’s before we shell out 20% to tuition).
Rent in major cities for a 1 bedroom pushing past 1.5-2k/month, it’s rough, and tuition ranges from 5k-10k/yr (which, afaik, is never waived here)
I joke (half-seriously) that I pay half my income to tuition, and the other two thirds goes to rent. And I’m one of the “lucky” ones that actually got a scholarship for graduate studies…
I’d estimate that half the grad students I know applied and didn’t win any scholarships
Standard operating procedure in school districts around here is austerity, being told how much more is being cut, then proudly announcing yet another new sportsball stadium and/or a new administrative wing to the already bloated building (now with a bowling alley just for administration!) that costs roughly the same amount as what must be cut.
I think software engineering played a significant part in moving the focus away from scientists in the modern era. Before computing scientists were the huge driver of everything, and they held a position of influence in society as a result of that. When computing came around software engineering happened and ever since then almost all “progress” in society has been through the lens of the creation of more and more software infrastructure. Eventually this is to reach a point of general saturation where almost all problems have some sort of software-engineering solution and science is going to be the only pathway forwards again, returning to the past dynamic. Obviously science also didn’t go away during this time but for the capitalists it’s quite obvious that software through techbros has dominated everything for some time now. This blindspot will hurt them more later when they eventually come out of the fog that software dominance has created.
Capitalists doing the sweating two red button meme where the buttons are “revolutionary solid state battery” and “tinder for dogs”.
Capitalists would just press the “tinder for dogs button”, nothing to sweat about
In retrospect, I was probably too generous to the capitalists. Tinder for dogs sounds less destructive and more funny than all of the shitcoins they’re actually investing in.
Capitalists don’t like dogs aside from as status symbols.
It’s something I noticed too. Computer science doesn’t seem to have as much “science”, and in STEM. The s and m are much quieter than the T and E. Not to say that engineering isn’t cool as shit even though I never majored in it (right now I’m weighing between CS and bioinformatics). Just that the US is turning itself into a one-trick pony.
Globalisation creates one-trick ponies. The entire world has been moving towards each country specialising into a very very specific thing, whether it’s technology or financial services or w/e.
Definitely, but I am surprised that it is happening to even
, a country with 331 million people and spans almost a continent wide.
Personal computing is a big part of this, too, I think. Software engineering is very materially different from “traditional” forms of research because there’s not a huge amount of capital and personnel that’s necessary to do said research
I think it’s probably not dissimilar to like, actual engineering. This too was wildly popular among the capitalists up until it matured to the point where almost all human problems have an engineering solution outside of megaprojects that are too high risk (and longterm) for the capitalists to want to expose themselves.
They pursue short term and low risk with highest gain. Eventually software will run out of this, it will mature to the point that the only available projects are so massive and high risk that they look elsewhere. When this happens new science becomes the highest impact potential again and they start paying attention to it, even elevating it to the forefront of national news because they want to hear more of it so they keep up with the latest thing. Right now they elevate tech to the forefront because it’s their world and they want to hear more about tech to be at the forefront of new things to try and get on that gravy train early. You can trace the difference between the 20s-60s and today back to the computer changing this environment, the bourgeoisie pushed science into the background and brought software engineering to the foreground, it’s not going to be infinite though. They will want science again when it can offer nothing more to them.
Gotta have a way to privatize the gains from publicly funded research without it being too obvious? I have no idea who’d be paying attention at this point though.
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The US might be about to discover that its ballooning admin/faculty ratio and reliance on underpaid and overworked postdoctoral researchers aren’t good ways to stay globally competitive on the basic research front.
I was going to say before tensions increased with China I remember PhD grads leaving for the simple fact that there were plenty of tenure track positions in China but far fewer here.
plenty of tenure track positions in China but far fewer here.
Every singe one of my professors, regardless of how long they’ve been at the university, has been an adjunct professor, and therefore paid extremely poorly. The only exception was a US history professor who spent half the class time talking about how Trump was the greatest president or whatever.
oh yeah, that’s the good stuff. godspeed and inshallah to the self-interested non-comrades who can see that american capitalism has nothing left to offer them.I would guess the open hostility has something to do with that
I read this as “Scientists of Cheese descent” at first and was very confused.
White libs will probably take this as a confirmation that they were CCP agents all along, rather than the most likely situation which is that anti Chinese racism in the US keep escalating as they manufacture more and more consent for conflict against CHINA
Of the survey respondents who have obtained US federal grants 45% say that they will avoid applying for such awards for fear of making mistakes in the application process that could lead to them being investigated.
Xiaoxing Xi is mentioned in the article and I wondered what Wikipedia had to say about him.
This jumped out at me: “According to Xi’s lawyer Peter Zeidenberg, the government did not understand the complicated science and failed to consult with experts before arresting him.”
False accusation of spying
In 2015, police raided the home of physics professor Xi Xiaoxing and arrested him at gunpoint in front of his wife and 2 daughters. The US Justice Department (DOJ) had accused the scientist of illegally sending trade secrets to China: specifically, the design of a pocket heater used in superconductor research, threatening him with 80 years in prison and $1 million in fines. The scientist’s daughter Joyce Xi said, "newscasters surrounded our home and tried to film through windows.
The FBI rummaged through all our belongings and carried off electronics and documents containing many private details of our lives. For months, we lived in fear of FBI intimidation and surveillance. We worried about our safety in public, given that my dad’s face was plastered all over the news. My dad was unable to work, and his reputation was shattered."
Temple University forced the professor to take administrative leave and suspended him as chair of the Physics Department. He was also banned from accessing his lab or communicating with his students directly. It was later learned that FBI agents had been listening to his phone calls and reading his emails for months — possibly years.
In September 2015, however, the DOJ dropped all charges against him after leading scientists, including a co-inventor of the pocket heater, provided affidavits that the schematics that Xi shared with Chinese scientists were not for a pocket heater or other restricted technology. According to Xi’s lawyer Peter Zeidenberg, the government did not understand the complicated science and failed to consult with experts before arresting him.
He said that the information Xi shared as part of “typical academic collaboration” was about a different device, which Xi co-invented and which is not restricted technology.
Suit against the government
Xi sued the United States and the FBI agents over violations of fourth and fifth amendment rights. The suit alleges that Xi was surveilled without a warrant and the FBI knowingly made false claims. In 2021, Xi a Philadelphia court rejected his legal claims for damages. The judge ruled that the claims involved matters of discretion and judgement of the defendants. Xi’s appeal was argued in Sept, 2022.
However, recent Supreme Court decisions will make it difficult to obtain damages for violations of constitutional rights.
However, recent Supreme Court decisions will make it difficult to obtain damages for violations of constitutional rights.
That really jumped out at me. I wonder how shitty the lib justices were. Was the decision 6-3 or 7-2 or 8-1 or 9-0?
The wholesome FBI was just protecting rules-based order! So what if they trampled on some Constitutionally-guaranteed rights and freedoms along the way?
wholesome FBI
It’s so weird that now. All the boldface Democrats <3 the FBI and they don’t care what it does. And in general all the GOP hate the FBI or pretend to. If the GOP grabs the presidency - they’ll get the FBI to do what they want. And then the GOP will <3 the FBI. And the dems will hate the FBI or pretend to.
The future is bright!
Clearly he must be a foreign agent, see hes even related to Xi!
oh danm.
Real brain drain hours. It’s good to see it effecting the US instead of the US being the beneficiary.
Science funding in the US is such a shit show. I’m glad I only know scientists and I was too stupid and poor to go into academia.
I’m not even of Chinese descent and every day I wish to become highly educated and be part of the brain drain.
i looked up my old professor that i loved and was part of the CPC and apparently hes back in china working on some biology project
maybe if i go on vacation to china one day ill ring him up. dude was a kickass professor, everyone loved himFBI doing a solid job creating a hostile work/country environment
