How the U.S. Shot itself In The Foot The 1st Time, now doing again for the 2nd time! 美國第一次搬石頭砸自己的腳，現在是第二次了!

Time was the 1950s. During the Second Red Scare, the U.S.government accused Qian Xuesen (Chinese: 钱学森), a leading expert in rockets, a full professor at MIT (1947) and at CIT(1949) and a colonel at the U.S. Dept. of Defense, of communist sympathies, without presenting any evidence. He spent 5 years under house arrest in an effort to gradually make his technical knowledge obsolete. Our government then sent him back to China in 1955. Upon his return, he helped greatly in making China a nuclear power. He was known in China as one of the fathers of “Two Bombs – one atomic & one nuclear, and one Satellite.”

Doing it to ourselves the 2nd Time!

SINOPHOBIA, which began in Trump I and fanned by the Biden Adminis-tration and Trump II, was what caused the mass exit of prominent senior scientists of Chinese origin from the U.S. to China.

China Initiative was the biggest and the best-known government sponsored Sinophobia. According to Wikipedia, “the program targeted hundreds of prominent Chinese-American academics and scientists, of which an estimated 250 lost their jobs. Many more had their careers negatively impacted and the prosecutions also contributed to at least one suicide.” Although DOJ claimed to have ended the program in 2022, there were repeated GOP House efforts to reinstitute it.

China Initiative, together with such strong Sinophobia sentiment in the U.S. as

(a) Pres. Trump’s statement that “almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy,” referring to Chinese students, and
(b) the farcical Chinese spy balloon, gave the 5.5 million Chinese Americans a strong sense of uncertainty, insecurity, and unwantedness. Result? Those with high mobility and are strongly courted by China decided to leave the U.S. for China.

Massive Brain Drain from the U.S. for the first 9 months of 2025

Lo & behold, 16 prominent senior scientists are leaving the U.S. for China PERMANENTLY in just the first 9 months! Could there be other reasons than Sinophobia that is driving them off? Let’s examine more closely.

(a) How about the lack of funding for science? No! Prominent senior scientists of other nationalities are not known to be returning to their respective nations.
(b) How about the recruitment programs of China like “1,000 Talent”? No!

China started the “1,000 Talents” program back in 2008. Although many scientists of Chinese origin signed up for part-time or co-appoitments, for the first 9 years, only Prof. Shi Yigong, a chaired prof. of the Princeton Univ. went back to China permanently, to the best of my knowledge. In contrast, in the first 9 months of 2025, 16 scientists of such prominence are returning to China for good.

Conclusion: It is the Sinophobia in the U.S. that drove the following list of
prominent, senior scientists of Chinese origin out of the U.S. The U.S. government must rethink its policy on intentionally creating a chilling effect among Chinese Americans. That policy seems counter-productive.