The flight of top scientists from the US to China is being exacerbated by an increasingly strained relationship between the two countries and the “hostile” conditions faced by those still working in America.

At least 85 rising and established scientists working in the US have joined Chinese research institutions full-time since the start of last year, according to CNN, with more than half making the move in 2025 – a trend experts say is set to expand as the White House cuts research budgets and steps up scrutiny of foreign talent.

The total number of departures since 2011 stands at around 850, with more than 70 per cent of them working in STEM fields according to

President Donald Trump’s administration has proposed a 36 per cent reduction in overall federal R&D funding, including a 40 per cent cut to the National Institutes of Health and a 50 per cent cut to the National Science Foundation.

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“I’d say it’s at a very difficult moment,” said Andrew Moran, head of criminology, sociology, politics and international relations at London Metropolitan University, “because you’ve got a convergence of Trump’s attacks on US universities at the same time as Congress is acting in a bipartisan way to question the involvement of Chinese scientists and Chinese students”.

Moran said the result was a difficult environment for academics. “There are problems around funding,” he said.

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“It must be difficult at the moment to plan for the future in terms of any kind of collaboration with an overseas partner, and in particular China, because those resources may be taken away by the administration.”

Given many Chinese universities now rival counterparts in the US, leaving America is less of a problem for scientists than it may have been previously.

“There are opportunities – Chinese universities are now becoming world class,” Moran added.

“So, it would make sense that academics would want to go to where they can carry out their research.”

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Chinese-born researchers have benefited from joint programmes and faculty exchanges with the US in recent decades – which has led to increased mobility – but these have “significantly contracted in recent years”, said Futao Huang, professor at the Research Institute for Higher Education at Hiroshima University.

“Joint programmes and faculty exchanges continue,” he said, “but they have become more selective and politically cautious. Many US universities have strengthened compliance and risk-assessment procedures, while Chinese institutions are reorienting partnerships toward Europe, Southeast Asia and the 51�Թ� South.”

Lawmakers in the US Congress are currently debating a bill that would all but prohibit researchers with any ties to China from receiving federal funding.

Huang warned that this reduced collaboration was harming the US because it “limits access to international talent and weakens global competitiveness in certain STEM areas”. For Huang, however, the future is not one of total disengagement.

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He expects “continued selective engagement rather than a complete decoupling”, with collaboration likely to persist “in non-sensitive fields such as climate science, public health, and education, but remain restricted in strategic technologies and defence-related research”.

Moran said that while universities were trying to preserve international openness, “the politics of the US” risked eroding that effort.

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“America is openly saying it wants to decouple from China,” he said. “At the same time, many of these relationships benefit the international community – especially around medicine and climate change. Those links need to be maintained.”

tash.mosheim@timeshighereducation.com