Add The New York Post on Google China is aggressively poaching America’s top scientists in its rabid quest for global dominance in fields like medicine, space and tech, with at least 105 of the best and brightest defecting to the communist nation since 2024, The Post has learned.
Nearly half of the recent wave of defectors over the last year is in biotechnology and medicine, according to a Post analysis, suggesting China is investing heavily to surpass the United States in medical innovation.
Other deserters specialize in critical fields like space science, climate change, computers and semiconductors.
They’ve all left US universities — or major corporations — to join what are in most cases Chinese Communist Party-funded institutions — lured by cash, with some like turncoat Harvard professor Charles Lieber promised a salary of $750,000 plus $150,000 in living expenses — and often their own sprawling research laboratories.
“Both China and the United States recognize that the battlelines being drawn in the global war for scientific talent are critical for national security,” said Jack Burnham, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ China Program.
“Beijing is increasingly betting that paralyzed federal science funding, concerns over immigration status for foreign workers and students at US universities, and its own pool of increasingly cutting-edge researchers will give it an advantage over Washington to lure away the next generation of top researchers.”
China was second only to the US as the world’s largest pharmaceutical market last year. It has long tried to figure out how to replicate American ingenuity, desperate to close the gap on drug research and development. Since 2024, it leapfrogged the US in clinical trial volume.
“There’s more and more interest in what China has been developing. They’re doing heavy recruiting in the US, and there’s an interest among scientists in the US because they have so much more freedom to advance treatments in China as opposed to what we’ve been mired down in regulatory restrictions in this country,” Dr. Roberta Shapiro, professor at Columbia University Medical Center and chief medical officer at Crescel, told The Post.
The FBI has repeatedly warned Chinese talent programs are part of a broader push to obtain foreign technology and expertise to bolster China’s strategic and military ambitions.
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“Time and time again, the Communist government of China has proven that it will use any means necessary to advance its interests at the expense of others,” FBI counterintelligence assistant director John Brown had told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Beijing aims to acquire our technology — often in the early stages of development — as well as our expertise, to erode our competitive advantage and supplant the United States as a global superpower.”
