Amid several high-profile departures of prominent US-based chemists for China, including chemistry Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi, economic analysis indicates that higher-quality scientists are increasingly the ones returning there from the US, especially in chemistry.
The number of returnees to China rose from 31 scientists in 2004 – more than 40% of which came from the US – to over 1400 in 2022 – over half of which came from the US. The data shows that between 2004 and 2022 about 10,000 scientists of Chinese origin had gone back to China, including over 5500 from the US.
When it comes to US-based Chinese scientists, the top performers – based on the share of citations their papers receive – have become progressively more likely to go back to China. And this shift over that 18-year period appears to have been driven by chemistry .
While the likelihood of a more highly cited chemist returning to China over a less highly cited one grew nearly five percentage points between 2003 and 2022, it actually declined among physicists and life scientists.
The performance of these ‘sea turtles’ – a pun on the Mandarin slang for a student who studies abroad and then returns – once they come back to China follows a similar pattern. The returning chemists went on to outperform similarly qualified peers who remained in the US. By comparison, returning life scientists fell behind their peers in the US, and returning physicists showed mixed results.
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