Editor’s note for Tuesday, April 27, 2021

My thoughts today:

We begin with one tale of stupidity in America, from a Bloomberg story titled “Anti-Asian atmosphere chills Chinese scientists working in U.S.”:

In early 2020 it was Wáng [Niánshuǎng 王年爽] who figured out how to make the spike protein on the novel coronavirus bind with human receptors, enabling Moderna Inc. to develop its COVID-19 vaccine in record time…

Now Wang, 34, is confronting another kind of contagion. He and his wife have been waiting three years for U.S. green cards, after then-President Donald Trump’s near-halt to legal immigration.

And then there’s this advice to turn up the stupidity dial in the form of a piece published by Washington, D.C., news website The Hill, titled: “Why not replace students from China with those from America?”

As occasional The China Project contributor Eric Fish puts it: The opinion piece advocated “government subsidies for American universities that reject applications from Chinese students. Calls them ‘potential threat’ to U.S. intellectual property; pushes false premise they’re taking STEM spots from U.S. students.”

The premise made legal scholar Maggie Lewis tweet: “Tearing my hair out.”

Not everyone in the U.S. is determined to score this own goal by blocking Chinese students and scientists on the assumption that it will improve national security or American competitiveness. Here’s some more coherent thinking on the subject by Evan Burke on ChinaFile, titled “The right way to bring Chinese STEM talent back to the U.S.”

But stupidity will probably win out, and America’s loss will be to the benefit of China, and any other country that can offer scientists a welcoming environment for the pursuit of knowledge.

Our word of the day is getting old before getting rich (未富先老 wèi fù xiān lǎo).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief