this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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this shit is insidious, widespread, and cleverly deployed.
i work at an R1 and years ago, i remember finding out about an on campus organization that connected young scientists with research institutions in china with incredible offers to study there. free tuition+housing+stipend, all coursework in english with mandarin lessons. and no requirement to stay there when complete. a pure "come learn some shit, you eager dorks" at the time i was finishing my MSci here, but the deal was absolutely incredible and the program selection/participating institution list was enormous. and we're talking for stuff like ecology, the bastard child of US academy that relies entirely on highly competitive, small bean grants, very few assistantships with research results generally ignored and high burnout among professionals. i totally filed it away for an alternative when i finished my MSci if i was unhappy with my professional options.
smashcut to a few years ago, the US comes down hard and insists any institution with this organization on its campus will have all fed funding clawed back. so naturally, it's gone with a CYA style email from the uni president saying, "this has been a great opportunity for our students, but our hands are tied. we can't give back $40 million [or whatever jumbo number]."
the writing has been on the wall for the neoliberal research university: they are starving us out. only research with immediate industry application (i.e. petroleum geology, etc) is getting any love, the rest of us can fuck ourselves. and this move was to staunch the flow of brain drain to the places where people with political power want to support scientific inquiry. 10 years ago i was hearing stories from senior faculty that had visited china and these were all casual libs, but they were blown away by the resources being put into scientific investigation into environmental sciences. when asked, "what research questions do you want answered?" the administrators said, "that is for our scientists to determine."
i cannot even imagine how far beyond the US they will have leapt in the coming decades.
A lot of people fail to appreciate the problem with corporate funded research. At the end of the day, companies want to make money and that means focusing on research that can be commercialized in the near future. Any kind of fundamental research generally won't have an immediate application, so there's no commercial incentive to throw money at it. Hard to justify to the shareholders that you're pouring money into something that may become useful in some way years down the road. Yet, this is where all the real breakthroughs come from. I think this is just another example of the failure of the capitalist model when it comes to doing any sort of long term planning. Capitalist incentives are directly at odds with doing complex projects that have a high risk of uncertainty associated with them.
So I completely agree that China will end up leapfrogging the west technologically in the coming years because of central planning. The state has a much longer horizon than companies, and it can afford to spend money on things like fusion research, or building moon bases without looking for any sort of immediate return. Having a state run education system coupled with a state directed industry allows for doing massive and ambitious projects that simply can't be done otherwise.
are you talking about the Confucius Institutes which they got rid of across the country? the Chinese Government Scholarship which covers tuition, housing, and pays you a stipend to study actually still exists. I'm sorta considering going there for my master's.
Is it only for US people? Or do you go through the Chinese embassy?
nope, anyone can apply. I don't even think you have to go through an embassy, I think it's just an application you fill out online. also from what I've read, it's easier for non-Chinese applicants to get into some of their best universities. schools like Tsinghua are stacked, you can look up the faculty and there's people from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, big tech companies, etc.
The only question is how old is too old to pack it all up and start again lol
my dilemma is whether I should go to China or some country in western Europe. China would be way more fun and life-changing, but it'll be harder to find work there and from what I understand, work/life balance isn't great, people work long hours, not much vacation, etc... Europe would be boring, but much more comfortable I think. no idea what to do, I'm having the hardest time deciding.
Europe might have been more fun before they were dragged through the mud of the Russian-Ukraine conflict and taken to the cleaners by USA regarding their oil and deindustrialization. Europe is really not looking too great in the coming decades. With their resources drained, how long can they keep their work/life balance and comforts? There will be more and more austerity measures, fewer social services, and fewer jobs.
that's definitely true, fascism seems on the rise in every country you look at in Europe. awful inflation, recession, energy issues. doesn't seem like the best place to be.