In an interview with the South China Morning Post, top mathematician
said a US professor had recently told him that “the American academic community is basically experiencing havoc like China’s Cultural Revolution”.
A number of Chinese-American researchers interviewed by the Post shared the same impression, describing their careers as “chaotic” and the path forward as looking increasingly uncertain.
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During China’s Cultural Revolution, intellectuals were branded as enemies of the people – the “stinking ninth class” – under the slogan “the more you know, the more subversive you are”.
The
the country’s largest research organisation and today the biggest in the world, was reduced during the turmoil from more than 100 institutes to fewer than 10.
Fang Shimin, a China-born researcher-turned-critic now living in the US, wrote on social media that the “new Trump-era Cultural Revolution”, like the Chinese experience, placed political loyalty above expertise.
He cited an October 2 report in the journal Science that said four directors from the National Institutes of Health were collectively fired, stripped of tenure and had their laboratories shut down.
“These academic positions will all have to be filled by laymen loyal to Trump, to faithfully execute the great leader’s instructions to destroy American scientific research,” Fang wrote.
