Who’s got the talent?
In the competition for scientific and technological supremacy, that question rises above the rest. Not long ago, the answer was unequivocal: the United States.
But while it remains the world’s leading destination for ambitious scientific minds, a combination of funding cuts, restrictive immigration policies and suspicion of Chinese-born scientists is eroding its advantage just as China, despite serious shortcomings of its own, is becoming a credible alternative.
The appeal of each country can be seen in two events of the past few months. The four winners of this year’s Fields Medal, one of mathematics’ highest honors, included two scholars born in China who had come to the United States for advanced studies. They flourished in — and remain in — the West.
Then there is Zhilin Yang. Like many Chinese, he came to the United States for his graduate degree. But rather than stay, he returned to China to start Moonshot AI. In July, his company released an impressive open-source A.I. model, called Kimi K3, that comes close to the performance of the best models made in America — at a lower cost.
Mr. Yang had no shortage of opportunities in the United States when he received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 2019. But he told Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a computer science professor and his doctoral thesis adviser, that he was determined to build a company in China.
“The U.S. still has a big, big advantage. We get the best people,” Mr. Salakhutdinov said. “But China will become more attractive. In the A.I. space, it’s becoming very clear.”
China has also become more successful at recruiting academic scientists from abroad. Omar Yaghi, who shared last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left the University of California, Berkeley, for Tsinghua University, where he will lead an institute using A.I. to accelerate the discovery of new materials. Since last year, universities in mainland China and Hong Kong have recruited at least eight prominent mathematicians from Western institutions. Joshua Zahl, who collaborated with Hong Wang, one of the Fields Medal winners this year, took a full-time professorship at Nankai University. He declined to discuss his move.
These are significant wins for a country where Tu Youyou was the only scientist working in mainland to have received a Nobel Prize in a scientific category.
The biggest change in China’s recruiting power is money, said Dong Jielin, who researches Chinese science and technology policy. Two decades ago, she said, scientists returning from abroad were expected to sacrifice financially in the name of serving the country. Now Chinese universities can offer salaries that are competitive with those in Europe, along with generous relocation packages.
Still, after the Fields Medal winners were announced, one question emerged in the extensive Chinese media coverage and an outpouring of online discussion: Can China’s academic system give unproven young researchers the freedom, patience and tolerance for failure they need to become exceptional?
The two Chinese-born winners, Ms. Wang and Yu Deng, entered Peking University in 2007. Mr. Deng, an International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalist, received direct admission to the university’s mathematics program. After his sophomore year, he transferred to M.I.T., earned his doctorate from Princeton and became a professor at the University of Chicago.
He said pursuing doctoral study abroad was common among Chinese students in basic science at the time. Chinese mathematics has improved substantially since then, he said, and publications by China-based researchers in leading mathematics journals have risen markedly.
Ms. Wang, 35, entered Peking University at 16 to study earth and space sciences and transferred into mathematics a year later.
She went to the École Polytechnique near Paris before doing further graduate studies at M.I.T. In a video, she described how her doctoral adviser at M.I.T. had listened patiently when she disagreed with others. “It helped me to gain confidence,” said Ms. Wang, now a professor at both New York University and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France. She declined requests to be interviewed.
In a video posted by the Simons Foundation after the Fields Medals were announced, she said she felt “a little discouraged” but found professors in France and the United States who helped her gain confidence. Ms. Wang was not criticizing Peking University, but her remark resonated widely in China, where many people treated “discouraged” as shorthand for their own experiences in a highly competitive education system shaped by punishment and shame. The hashtag “discouraged” remains censored on the social media platform Weibo.
“If they had not left China at 20, would they still be standing on that prize stage today?” asked a YouTube commentator who goes by Laozhou Hengmei. China’s scientific achievements, he argued, still did not match its economic size and abundance of talent.
China can increasingly match the funding and infrastructure that attract prominent scientists. What it has more difficulty reproducing are the freedom, trust and institutional stability that allow young talent to flourish. Those remain among America’s strongest advantages, and the very advantages its current policies are putting at risk.
“The U.S. used to be sort of the default, the no-brainer option,” Terence Tao, an Australian-born Fields medalist who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a video.
Last year, the Trump administration’s suspension of federal funding to U.C.L.A. affected both his personal grant and an institute he helps lead. The funding was reinstated after a successful lawsuit. But he has warned that abrupt funding disruptions can derail multiyear projects and damage researchers’ trust in the system.
“The best and brightest may not automatically come to the U.S. as they have for decades,” he said.
Foreign students received nearly 44 percent of the STEM doctorates awarded by American universities in 2023. Students from China earned 17 percent of all U.S. doctorates in science and engineering in 2020, and about 87 percent of Chinese recipients from 2005 to 2015 intended to stay, a 2023 study found.
The United States is now making that pipeline less dependable. The number of visas issued to international students fell by roughly one-third in 2025.
Last month, the Trump administration finalized a rule limiting how long foreign students can remain without applying for an extension. Announcing the measure, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said it would keep them focused on their “primary purpose: completing their studies and returning home.”
Mr. Deng, 37, the 2026 Fields medalist, said many universities in China, the United States and elsewhere had contacted him. He was considering his options but will remain at the University of Chicago for now. His research, collaborators and quality of life would all influence his decision, he said.
I asked whether, if he were 20 today, he would still leave China for the United States. He noted the cuts to research funding and knowledge of the people affected by visa problems.
“If I were making the decision in China today,” he said, “I would think much more carefully about whether to come to the United States.”
