Many people say China will catch up or exceed U.S in military strength decades later.

vesicles said:

If they are simply doing their own research, they would contribute to China's scientific development the same way as they have done in where ever they used to be before they went back to China. Why am I saying this? Well, this is because of the difference between industry and academia. In an industrial setting, every company keeps their secrets tightly and sees special skills of their employees as special assets that they protect very closely. A person's expertise in certain matter can only be utilized if he/she works for you in your company. He can not only contribute by using his special skills in actual projects, but also train other co-workers on the technology.

However, the academia setting is the complete opposite. We pride ourselves for sharing everything. Not only that, our career depends on it. There are two main things you look at when you evaluate the success of a scientific researcher: funding and publication. The two are of course connected. You need funding to do experiments so that you can publish your data. And the more and the better publication you have, your credibility as a researcher is better and your chance of getting more money is higher. A key element in this chain of event is how repeatable your data is. In the industry, you want to make sure you are the only one that has a certain technology, while in the academia, you want to make sure everybody can do it. In fact, your credibility, reputation and career depend on it. If you are the only one who can do it, people will joke about how "special" your lab is, but in their mind, everyone is thinking one of two things:
1) you made a mistake in your experiments, which mean you are incompetent.
2) You made up your data, which means...... Well we all know what that means: the end of your career

Although behind your back, people might only talk about #1, but nearly everyone is thinking about #2. We don't say it because, well, that destroys people. You don't make that kind of accusation unless you have concrete evidence. Anyway, you as a researcher will have a bad reputation. This is why I said in another post that scientists welcome validation from other people with open arms. And the only way to make sure others can repeat what we have done is to describe our thought process, experimental procedure and data analysis in such detail in our publication that anybody with minimal training would be able to do it. That means, if you want to learn my technique and my theories, all you have to is to read my papers. And anybody in the world with internet access can do that. That means any Chinese scientist is able to learn everything the world-class scientists have done any time they want. And this means, whether you are in the US or in China, you will influence how Chinese scientists do things in the same way. By doing your own research, the influence you have on Chinese scientific development would be the same no matter where you are since you are sharing everything in your papers. So why the trouble moving all the way back to China???

Of course, these scientists can also boost the reputation of the school/department they are in and attract more talented scientists to the school. But in China, that simply means internal movement of talents. The overall level of scientists in ALL china has not changed. So to that particular university with these see turtles, it's a good thing, but for China, it has no effect. Of course, these see turtle can also train more young talents. But they are already doing it while they are abroad. AS we all know, almost every lab in the US has Chinese students/postdocs. Especially, Chinese professors tend to have more Chinese students/postdocs. In fact, many labs headed by Chinese professors are composed of entirely Chinese staff. So coming back to China is not changing too much of that. So in other words, simply doing your research won't change a thing.

By adapting to the local environment, it means these scientists may have to bribe officials to get funding, or even worse, to become one of the corrupted officials. This means spending more time entertaining the officials and less time on research. That will actually hurt them. Of course, they can choose to be clean and not to do those things. This would mean that those corrupted officials won't give them funding they need to continue their projects. That will also hurt them. In other words, simply doing their own research will hurt them much more than they can help with the China's effort to develop its science and technology.

Simply put, they need to change the environment and be political.

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Infra_Man99 said:

I have worked in scientific research labs, and I disagree and agree with your many ideas. The overseas sea turtles do need to change their environment and be political, but they need to learn from the mainland, too.

China needs to learn from overseas turtles, but overseas turtles need to learn from China. Both sides should learn from one another. If one side wants to improve or wants new solutions, then it needs to do things differently. Doing the same things over and over will get the same results. Both sides can improve each other by learning new things from each other.

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vesicles said:

Agreed. Simply copying the Western way probably won't work. They have to work with local-trained scientists to find a way that fits China. But I do feel that these sea turtles generally have a good understanding of China's system since they most likely finished their college in China and only moved abroad for graduate school. For the most part, they'd maintained their communication with their Chinese colleague while working abroad. So they have a pretty good idea of how China's scientific world goes.

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