Has China Already Won?
The surprising outcome of Trump’s funding cuts and the future of science
Doing science is constant misery. No number of Nobel Prizes awarded, speeches from politicians and CEOs extolling the virtues of a life of discovery, or paeans from journalists about their wondrous discoveries on the frontiers of knowledge can ameliorate this cruel constant: career scientists teeter between perdition and ignominy.
This is a truism and not a suddenly unearthed fact. The institutions of science have been updated across the years, of course. The assiduous pursuit of patronage during the Renaissance is hardly dissimilar from the perpetual applications to scientific funding agencies for a few spare years of grant money to keep one’s career alive. The singular Star Chamber has been replaced by the far more decentralized — but no less capricious — tenure committees on campuses nationwide. Perhaps the only improvement is that the publish and perish censorship of the Gutenberg era has given way to the modern world’s publish or perish, and of a less corporeal kind.
Yes, the life of the scientist is one of profound toil. The extremely long hours; the insecure yet always low pay; the constant rejections of one’s work by peers; the political inertia one confronts at the boundaries of accepted theory; the administrative overhead, the extraordinarily long gestation period across bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs; and then the perma-hell of postdocs.
Why do people then choose these careers? Maniacal passion against empirical reason, for some. Sunk cost fallacy, for others. But whatever the reason, data indicates that most budding scientists don’t actually end up choosing these careers at all. Although an inordinate number of Americans take biology in the course of their studies, the Department of Labor estimated the number of professional life and biological scientists at a low half a million in 2023. That’s what statisticians call survivorship bias.
What will these survivors do next? Over the past few months, the Trump administration has taken an axe to the funding of scientific research and training, enacting sweeping cuts across critical institutions such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Grant funding for the field of physics is down 85% so far this year, math 72% and materials science 63% according to an analysis by The New York Times. It’s a time of deep despondency in science circles (and it’s why my partners here at Lux Capital introduced the Lux Science Helpline for scientists who are directly experiencing the cuts and are looking for a commercial path forward).
Trump’s aggressive tactics have led to the obvious analysis that this is China’s moment to capture global science supremacy. The Hill ran a prototypical op-ed that noted “Policies that cut U.S. funding for research or directives that limit talent inflows will almost certainly undermine future scientific progress.” That’s logical. Take a swing with the axe through the field’s most important funding bodies, and science will suffer. The op-ed concludes: “Without sustained federal support, the United States will continue to lose ground to China.”
Yet by Betteridge's law, the answer to the question in my headline must obviously be “no.” Notice the barnacle of nuance in that quote from the op-ed: “almost certainly.” Is it almost certain? For the survivors of one of the most brutal intellectual competitions humanity has devised — the career of a scientist — are Trump’s cuts a final shot in the head, or just one more deprivation in a journey already filled with them?
For scientists who are American citizens, the obvious question is whether to migrate elsewhere. On the margin, a smattering will likely move to Europe or Canada; the more adventurous may head to East Asia or perhaps a university like KAUST in Saudi Arabia. Science is already a global market, though, and if it were easy to build a career elsewhere, scientists would have already been doing that in droves. None of these markets are less competitive for funding.
Now consider international scientists. Why do Chinese, Indians, Koreans and Iranians study in U.S. doctoral programs in large numbers, particularly in the sciences and engineering? It’s because the American higher education system is the only one in the world with the capacity to take them all in and offer them a top-flight education.
I researched at Korea’s top science university, KAIST, for a year. It’s a phenomenal school, world-ranked, and has a lineage connecting back to Stanford’s Frederick Terman, who advised on the conception of the university as part of an Agency for International Development program. KAIST and other elite universities are so vital to Korea’s nation-building that the pursuit of a doctoral degree in engineering is one of the only exceptions for men to avoid the military draft (others include winning an Olympic gold medal). Meanwhile, Korea spends more on R&D as a percentage of its economy than any nation besides Israel.
Yet Korea can’t fund a higher education system to train all the doctoral students it needs. Instead, it relies on exporting a lot of its young talent to the United States before drawing as many of those students back home as possible. Thankfully, the United States has a voracious appetite for international scientists, since again, careers of scientists are tough and Americans by and large don’t want them.
The same pattern holds true elsewhere. India, China and Iran lack the funding and scale of America’s higher education system, and so many of their top students and researchers similarly hop the ocean in pursuit of a more ambitious path.
Trump is now cutting back on the funding that supports many of those students. The number of graduate research fellowships from the NSF was halved this year, forcing students once again into a life of peripatetic begging for patrons. Researchers are facing the same crisis. Will all of these professionals simply migrate back to their home countries? No, since there are no untapped pools of funding elsewhere. Indeed, too much of the commentariat ignores the much simpler answer: many of these scientists will just stop being survivors. They will find other economic paths and move on.
Consider the case of Chinese students and researchers. China has rapidly expanded its PhD production in the past decade, as Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology found in a recent report. Its PhD production vastly outstrips America’s, and the gap has been growing for years. Nevertheless, an estimated third of America’s doctoral students hail from across the Pacific, with a heavier concentration in science and engineering than other fields. These Chinese scientists are certainly aware of their home country’s own universities, so why do they come? Opportunity, broadly conceived. Even with China’s acceleration, there is still more demand for science careers than the country can offer. So they look overseas.
If Trump’s cuts are fully enacted, how quickly could China suddenly absorb a surge of tens of thousands of science students? China is legendary for its economic adaptability and speed of construction, but the education of a scientist requires mentorship and apprenticeship, which are not nearly as easy to scale. Training scientists for the most complex work on the edge of the possible is particularly daunting, requiring an extraordinary focus on fostering intellectual community, enforcing meritocratic standards, providing flush resources, and more. What’s far more likely to happen is a crowding-out effect: some American-based PhD students will supplant those who stayed behind, bringing numbers back to equilibrium relatively quickly.
As for professional Chinese scientists, they face an even more daunting prospect of returning home. Despite China’s enormous focus on building up its research capacity, unemployment, particularly among young talent, is pervasive. In fact, China has specifically expanded grad school to avoid absorbing so many workers into its labor economy in the first place. With China retrenching, it’s not an opportune moment to further surge funding to science.
If the case of China doesn’t convince you, look to Europe. The United Kingdom is enacting its own funding cuts; scientists won’t go there. On the continent, the EU is taking a somewhat different tack. European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen recently proposed a €500 million boost to the bloc’s science funding over the next three years. In addition, scientists relocating from the United States and elsewhere would be able to reimburse €2 million of their startup costs, up from €1 million today. These are notable commitments, but don’t radically reshape the global scientific economy in any meaningful way.
So where do the scientists go? Nowhere. America’s retreat from science isn’t likely to directly hand the keys of sci-tech dominance to China, but it will slow the progress of the global scientific commons and will have serious cascading effects for all scientists in these fields as their career paths narrow even further. That’s hardly a positive, but a careful investigation of the economy of knowledge production indicates that the Cassandras are just that. Science has been miserable for generations, and the misery is now even more acute. The next phase of science’s Battle Royale has begun — who is ready to drop out?
