Transcript: The War for Chinese Talent in America, with David Zweig

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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This week’s topic is especially salient in light of the shockwaves that DeepSeek has sent through the U.S. high-tech community. The astonishing capabilities of a once obscure Chinese AI company have upended some assumptions about the development of generative AI. And there’s been a growing awareness of the role that ethnically Chinese computer scientists, whether in China or in the U.S., have played in making generative AI a reality. People were only half joking when they said that the so-called AI arms race right now between China and the United States is really one between Chinese and China and Chinese in the U.S.

At the same time, we are less than a month into the presidency of Donald Trump, who has made hostility to immigration a major part of his brand, even as he surrounded himself with Silicon Valley tech billionaires, one of whom is an immigrant, with huge stakes in the contest for AI supremacy. There is a lot of speculation that he’s set to revive the China Initiative, which was originally launched in his first presidency in November 2018, and which was renamed, and according to some, made less overtly national-origin-focused and prone to racial profiling under President Biden. But what will the fate of ethnically Chinese science and tech talent in the U.S. be under this new administration? Well, folks, we have a fascinating discussion ahead as we explore the politics of global talent flows, technology transfer, and national security with David Zweig, author of The War for Chinese Talent in America: The Politics of Technology and Knowledge.

Professor Zweig, David, is a longtime scholar of China’s recruitment of overseas talent, and he has extensively researched China’s talent programs, the U.S. response to them, and the broader implications for scientific collaboration and national security. David, welcome to Sinica. It’s great to have you on the show, finally.

David Zweig: Well, thank you. It’s great to be here.

Kaiser: David, I’m curious, first, what prompted you to write such a book? You’re a Canadian academic, you’re teaching in Taipei, you’ve had appointments in Hong Kong. What was it that got you fascinated on this particular topic?

David: Well, I’ve been interested in the movement of talent across borders for a long time, partly because I have a model in my head which basically says when resources cross borders, the value of that resource changes. Therefore, people in both countries where the original, the host country and the home country have an interest, potentially, in moving those goods, services, or people across the border. So, for a long time, I wrote a book called Internationalizing China, published by Cornell in 2000, and that had a chapter on education. And part of what I looked at was how… there was a section there on returnees, right? Which has been the focus. Really, I started interviewing returnees in 1991 in China, the first group that went out. And so I’ve been interested in the value that they bring, the extent to which they become more valuable as their human capital, transnational capital, whatever, increases having gone overseas and come back. And so I’m interested in their impact when they come back. Can they play a positive role in reform? How do they settle into society? So, I’ve been working on that. I’ve been working on that book for a long, long time. And then there was a chapter in the book that I focused on called “The Diaspora Option.”

Kaiser: Right. That’s one of the central ideas in this book.

David: Correct. So, that was chapter seven, and then chapter eight was suddenly Trump is going with the China Initiative, and people around that I know are getting in trouble. And I became an expert witness for two Chinese who were charged or who got into trouble — one was NIH and the other was Department of Justice. And so I decided to write a chapter to bring the whole study of going out to study and coming back, to put that almost that I felt it was going to end, right? That the outflow was going to end, the people in the United States were going to be under enormous pressure. So I looked at the book and I had probably going to be 500 pages, and then I said, wait a second. The last two chapters, “The Diaspora Option” and the China Initiative, made a book in itself — up-to-date, topical, would be something that people would want to talk about. And so I just went looking for a publisher of a short book series. There’s all these short books now, Kaiser, you know, series. Cambridge has one. So, I did it with the Association of Asian Studies. So, you have to make it 75,000 words or less, about 150 pages. And I fit it in.