Chientists

I think it's a slightly different connotation. "China scientists" infers scientists residing in China while not presuming their ethnicity, while "Chinese scientists" implies their ethnicity but not their location.

Real talk, why is discussion around people and subjects in China so fucking weird?

If it's not referring to the entire population when it only applies to the government or a subset of them as a global "the Chinese" or doing silly shit like "China scientists" everyone's grammatical skills suddenly tank when even broaching a topic even tangential to the PRC.

Probably because is an ethnicity and nationality. There are ethnic Chinese people all over the world and a few countries and regions are made of a majority of ethnic Chinese but are not related to China. Calling them the same thing is playing into the PRC's "all ethnic Chinese pledge their allegiance to China" nonsense.

No, it's people who study fine tableware.

Seriously, for me a "China scientist" is someone doing research on China, like a space scientist would do research on astronomy and similar. But I'm not a native English speaker, so, idk

Me stutter? No think so!