China Buys Time For Its Young Scientists As US Rations It

(MENAFN- Asia Times) On September 19, Dou Xiankang, who heads the National Natural Science Foundation of China, described a grant that most young scientists anywhere would envy.

Researchers under 35 will get 15 years of support. The money doubles after five years and doubles again after ten, and there are no short-term performance reviews. The only test, Dou said, is“whether they are in the laboratory.” Forty-four people were chosen this year. Nine came from overseas.

Fifteen years is long enough to fail twice and try again, and that's apparently the point. The Fields Medals awarded in July (the top prize in mathematics) made the case for patient money in science. Beijing has now put some on the table.

That matters more than the usual scorecard of who hired whom. What the two science powers are really competing on is time. China is trying to buy it for its young researchers; the United States, which for decades gave it away almost without noticing, has started to ration it.

Start with the American side. In July, the Department of Homeland Security finalized a rule that ends open-ended stays for foreign students and caps admission at four years, a change Secretary Markwayne Mullin said would keep them focused on“completing their studies and returning home.” The number of F-1 visas issued – the kind degree students need – fell by a third last year.

Research money has become less dependable too. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) cut off 2,291 active grants in 2025, pulling back US$2.45 billion. A study in the journal PNAS found that women and early-career researchers were hit hardest.

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The instability extends across agencies; at the National Science Foundation, even Terence Tao, the Fields medalist at UCLA, had two grants suspended last year until a federal judge ordered them restored.

The awkward part for Washington? China's new 15-year grant is an American idea. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a private research funder, has long backed “people, not projects,” appointing investigators for seven years at a time and leaving them free to change direction.

When the economists Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Graff Zivin and Gustavo Manso compared those investigators with equally accomplished scientists on shorter, stricter NIH grants, they found that the Hughes group produced about twice as many of the most highly cited papers. It also produced more flops. That's what tolerance for failure looks like in the data.

China appears to have taken the lesson. The country that produced it has never applied it beyond a small corner of its own system.

But time is only half of what a young scientist needs, and the Fields Medals show the other half. Two of this year's four winners, Hong Wang and Yu Deng, entered Peking University together in 2007 and then built their careers abroad.

Wang has said she felt discouraged early on, until professors in France and the United States helped her find her confidence. At MIT, her adviser heard her out when she disagreed with others. Her remark struck such a nerve at home that a hashtag built on it was censored on Weibo.

No grant pays for that. China can increasingly match Western salaries and laboratories. But it can't simply buy a culture in which an unproven 25-year-old contradicts a senior professor and pays no price for it.

The new program doesn't settle this. Showing up at the lab every day proves diligence; it says little about curiosity. A committee has to spot greatness in people under 35 and then bet heavily on a few dozen of them. Much depends on details not yet public: how the winners are picked, whether they may change course and whether they may leave.

That last question is no longer hypothetical. Exit rules in force since September 15 let the authorities stop anyone judged a risk to China's technological security from leaving the country, and the spouses and children of top AI researchers reportedly now need official approval to travel abroad. A 15-year promise looks different when leaving takes permission.

America's advantage is of a different kind, and it's still large. Foreigners on temporary visas earned 38% of US science and engineering doctorates in 2024. Of the Chinese nationals who earned such a doctorate between 2006 and 2015, 87% were still in the country in 2017.

They stayed for the networks, the capital and the arguments. All of that rests on being able to plan. Deng, now at the University of Chicago, has said he'd think much harder about coming to the United States if he were choosing today.

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Some have already gone the other way. Omar Yaghi, who shared last year's Nobel Prize in chemistry, left Berkeley for Tsinghua University in Beijing in July.

The cheapest talent policy any government has is a promise it keeps: grants that aren't cut off mid-project, visa rules that don't change mid-degree. Each system is weakest where the other is strong. China is building patient capital. America still has the patient culture, the kind that lets young people be wrong out loud. Whoever manages both will lead.

So far nobody has. That leaves an opening for the rest of the Asia-Pacific. Singapore's new five-year research plan, worth S$37 billion (US$28.6 billion), promises fresh schemes to attract young research talent, and the Australian Academy of Science is leading a national drive to recruit scientists from the United States.

Neither country has to pick a side in this rivalry. Nor do South Korea or India. But money alone would only repeat Beijing's bet. The prize goes to whoever can offer long-term money and an open argument in the same place.

The first of China's 15-year grants will run out around 2041. By then we'll know whether time alone was enough.

Y. Tony Yang is an endowed professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

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