China
The other day I ran a poll. Here's what actually happened and how China came to integrate its way into the mission-critical United States R&D sector. They provided the cheap labor that had been deliberately mislabeled as 'Study' so as to avoid paying market wage to US scientists.
After exporting 16 in '83, the US allowed China to flood +35,000 'graduate students' into US universities over 20 yrs. It's almost inconceivable, yet that's why Universities rail against our own people; this is a generation of University leaders who flooded their own labor mkts.
So why was I on this since the 1980s?
Very simply: This wasn't study abroad. This was not a US failure in STEM education. This wasn't b/c science is 'international'.
This was a GIANT security hole on a scale no one could discuss because ALL leading US universities were gorging.
This was because we didn't support US science and research when we had the chance and we didn't close down our labs. Instead we came up with a multi-decade lie about "students are not workers" and "Science knows no borders" in a big beautiful world where "borders are artificial".
So we invited another nation with an incompatible form of government from our own, to look at EVERYTHING we had that gave us a technical advantage should we have to compete with a newly muscular China. And I mean everything. This is why our Elite protect all Chinese connections.
So when you want to know how we lost our edge, now you know why we are so interdependent on an enormous foreign powerhouse whose leverage over our 'elite' knows no bounds as we cannot decouple. This has nothing to do with race or Xenophobia. Its about the loyalty of our 'Elite'.
And by the way...one last thing: I'm not blaming China.
Why? Because if any nation were actually self-destructive enough to hand me the keys to their most critical sector the way the US did since the early 1980s...well I would have done *exactly* what China did.
Who wouldn't?
And for those that didnât see it, here is that Twitter Poll mentioned in the thread:
In 1983, the U.S. granted STEM PhD degrees to 16 Chinese Nationals. That would be 320 if repeated every year for 20 years. Yet Graduate Students are actually the core of the critical U.S. STEM research *labor* force.
Guess how many U.S. PhDs were granted China between 1983-2003:
This is hard to keep saying: almost everything we think about STEM is wrong.
A) We the US are GREAT at science.
B) Workers are mislabeled as students/trainees.
C) We underfund research.
D) China sends workers valued by Unis as they not as free or expensive as our own people.
Are you suggesting that US universities should have had fewer STEM doctoral candidates in total, or that they should have excluded foreign nationals, or only foreign nationals from a country with an âincompatible form of government?â 1/x
Think of it as âIntellectual Munchausen By Proxyâ where the leadership of STEM at @NSF and @theNASciences have historically made up stories about how their own children (US STEM) are too sickly/greedy/unruly to do research. But our pliant temp visa holders are obedient wiz-kids.
The US STEM complex is induced to murder careers of our own people because we are not trained to be obedient workers. We use freedom & irreverence based education. Our edge is our middle finger and US STEM folks rightly demand market level US salaries to power our market economy.
So hereâs our choice.
Either:
A) Stop whining and pay US STEM costs for some of the best and most irreverent mavericks in the world.
B) Shut down the programs that canât compete.
C) Prepare to have PRC work its way into every corner of US R&D by supplying our workforce.
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