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Senior US professor resigns from UNC Chapel Hill to protest persecution of Chinese scholars. US media refused to publish his reasons. (global.chinadaily.com.cn)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

this shit is insidious, widespread, and cleverly deployed.

i work at an R1 and years ago, i remember finding out about an on campus organization that connected young scientists with research institutions in china with incredible offers to study there. free tuition+housing+stipend, all coursework in english with mandarin lessons. and no requirement to stay there when complete. a pure "come learn some shit, you eager dorks" at the time i was finishing my MSci here, but the deal was absolutely incredible and the program selection/participating institution list was enormous. and we're talking for stuff like ecology, the bastard child of US academy that relies entirely on highly competitive, small bean grants, very few assistantships with research results generally ignored and high burnout among professionals. i totally filed it away for an alternative when i finished my MSci if i was unhappy with my professional options.

smashcut to a few years ago, the US comes down hard and insists any institution with this organization on its campus will have all fed funding clawed back. so naturally, it's gone with a CYA style email from the uni president saying, "this has been a great opportunity for our students, but our hands are tied. we can't give back $40 million [or whatever jumbo number]."

the writing has been on the wall for the neoliberal research university: they are starving us out. only research with immediate industry application (i.e. petroleum geology, etc) is getting any love, the rest of us can fuck ourselves. and this move was to staunch the flow of brain drain to the places where people with political power want to support scientific inquiry. 10 years ago i was hearing stories from senior faculty that had visited china and these were all casual libs, but they were blown away by the resources being put into scientific investigation into environmental sciences. when asked, "what research questions do you want answered?" the administrators said, "that is for our scientists to determine."

i cannot even imagine how far beyond the US they will have leapt in the coming decades.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

A lot of people fail to appreciate the problem with corporate funded research. At the end of the day, companies want to make money and that means focusing on research that can be commercialized in the near future. Any kind of fundamental research generally won't have an immediate application, so there's no commercial incentive to throw money at it. Hard to justify to the shareholders that you're pouring money into something that may become useful in some way years down the road. Yet, this is where all the real breakthroughs come from. I think this is just another example of the failure of the capitalist model when it comes to doing any sort of long term planning. Capitalist incentives are directly at odds with doing complex projects that have a high risk of uncertainty associated with them.

So I completely agree that China will end up leapfrogging the west technologically in the coming years because of central planning. The state has a much longer horizon than companies, and it can afford to spend money on things like fusion research, or building moon bases without looking for any sort of immediate return. Having a state run education system coupled with a state directed industry allows for doing massive and ambitious projects that simply can't be done otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The 2021 National Defense Act gives the gov. power to exclude funding to Universities that host even the most simple of organizations like the Confucius Institute, so.. Desperately clinging to convince people China is bad by doing whatever they can. Frustrating for sure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

How dare they come here and fund language learning!

It's deep. I hate it. One fear was that China was exercising soft power, I think. If people would become sinophiles just by learning a bit about China, what does that say about the image the west paints it the validity of the western worldview? It's not a ringing endorsement but they know libs don't ask questions. They also know that setting up universities and institutes is one of the ways the CIA gets it's claws in through the NED, etc. They probably thought China would do the same. Which is probably kinda true.