[dirtyid]

There's roughly comparable English speakers US can draw from on Earth as Mandarin speakers in PRC, around 1B each. US recruiting from world is a dumb meme. Except PRC can retain most of talent since net emigration and US immigration / brain drain specifically can only absorb fraction vs numbers that stay in PRC. Drop in bucket really. The numbers game massively favours PRC right now, beside which PRC aren't even sending predominantly their best anymore. Most of kids going abroad are B tier students who couldn't hack it in PRC system. Unlike before 2010s where best from PRC goes abroad since no opportunity at home. That's different now and largely why PRC climbing all the academic and innovation indexes fast.

[seanmcdirmid]

The issue is that it’s a world market for top talent, and how many Indian computer scientists are moving to China rather than Europe or the UK? The best in the PRC is usually just the best from the PRC, that isn’t true in the west (the best may not be and often isn’t from the west).

[dirtyid]

The ~1B English speakers includes Indians, that's a global denominator which includes west and rest. The point is US/west access to talent pool isn't some lopsided 8B vs 1.4B, not everyone is eligible.

Hence if PRC retains domestic best, then PRC has relatively comparable talent pool to draw from as US+west. The trend will favour English base effect over time. Also important to distinguish that it's not just about getting only best, US has had skilled shortage for years, their immigration system doesn't absorb enough talent, vs PRC gets to retain huge % of over produced talent to the point of youth unemployment meme. But that means positions gets filled as PRC ramps up or expands in scitech sectors.

[seanmcdirmid]

> Hence if PRC retains domestic best, then PRC has relatively comparable talent pool to draw from as US+west.

If that were true, why do we keep getting so many good PRC computer scientists in the states? When I was working in China, we lost of a lot of great candidates to Google or Facebook in the USA. China's net emigration rate is still very positive, and that's not mostly migrant workers and people on Chinese restaurant visas.

PRC's lack of access to worldwide talent is a problem, since they aren't exactly keeping their best either. They pay better for software positions than Taiwan and Japan, or even Korea, and they can leverage that, at least.

[dirtyid]

That's why I conditioned it with "if", it's a trend in progress. Opportunities are still great abroad, especially in SV. But part of this is due to past generations being very drainable due to English proficiency previously emphasised in curriculum to increase knowledge transfer from abroad. Sending talent abroad who may come back (trend increasing) and learning academic lingua franca was a good strategy. But in the last few years we see PRC moving away from English, project trend forward 5-10 years that means generations without previous levels of English fluency has much less chance of "best" being drained away due to lack of ability to integrate in western knowledge ecosystem while domestic ecosystem sufficient to retain and grow talent. If many/most of the top papers in X field are written in Chinese, less need to learn or even publish in English to stay competitive, and indeed language may become a competitive moat. I don't see many in western institutions trying to learn Chinese to stay competitive, and even hiring Chinese may become an issue.

This is already happening. Yes some good/great talent are and will continue to be drained to SV / west, but they're unlikely to be best, unlike in the past where the state deliberately sent best abroad. Some of them are top tier, but being so + not fluent are increasingly common. Same reason we get lots of "good" PRC students manning tier1 academic labs in the west. It's symptom of generating overabundance of talent. Even 20 years ago, many of the PRC students in tier1 labs I knew weren't really top 1% or even 5% students. They're smart enough for the western institutions and their family can afford to send them abroad. But many will admit much smarter folks stayed in PRC because they didn’t have resources to leave. The result of that is reports like this.

Wasn't until the last decade that domestic opportunities have exploded, still not matching supply of talent generation or compensation of the west, but enough that linguistically / culturally severing ability to integrate abroad will start to affect talent drain. Ultimately, PRC's lack of access to world wide talent is a disadvantage, but I don’t think it's * that * significant. Going forward, I anticipate and see signs of PRC language policies increasingly reducing the west's ability to brain drain, and they're already not draining overwhelmingly the best like pre 00s. Hence IMO indigenous talent pool at PRC scale will be enough. That may still be 100,000s of talent emigrating per year, but it's a single digit percentage and if it ever comes to it, sanctions / exit VISAs / bans on working in unfriendly countries just like US/TW block their semi engineers from working in PRC.

The other point I want to emphasize is quantity matters as well. Quality is limited if (western) immigration caps still result to 5-6 digit technical talent shortage, still need tons of B tier bodies doing the grunt work. That's where PRC has advantage, IMO oversupply of talent better than undersupply.

[seanmcdirmid]

> but they're unlikely to be best, unlike in the past where the state deliberately sent best abroad.

I don't see that happening for a long time. Very few, if any, kids are turning down MIT to go to Tsinghua instead, and once they are abroad in the states to study, if they are in STEM (ignoring the non-STEM kids who go because they have money), they aren't going to come back unless they get access to some crazy resources. What we settled for in our Beijing Research lab, at least, were some under the radar talent with PhDs from Zhongshan universities, very good people, but even the Tsinghua PhD student (who isn't as good as the PhD undergrad) would go abroad even in the late 2010s.

The lack of worldwide talent hurts China in terms of practices and tech culture. It isn't just access to a wider talent pool, but cultural nuances don't really gets ingrained since you get your workers in the west from a wide variety of countries. China is also becoming less liberal, not more, and that can't help either in terms of retaining talent (under Xi, there are real risks to staying and raising your family in china vs abroad, and there is no end to Xi's rule in sight, things could get really messy without a planned peaceful transition of power). Finally, China's housing bubble has no end in sight. You think a million dollar town home in Seattle is expensive? Try 1.5 million for a two bedroom apartment in Beijing! Unless you can make ALOT more money in Beijing, why not work in Seattle instead? At least you can buy a house.

China is going to do OK with all of this, but I don't think they going to thrive as much as you think they are. They have a lot of big challenges coming up in the next decade.

[dirtyid]

There are more Tsinghua / C9 calibre students who don't have the language proficiency or resources or adventurousness to go to MIT / abroad. Some may later chose to emigrate abroad, as they do now after making decent money, but my conversations with diaspora and their C9 kids is more and more are choosing to stay, simply because QoL and culture in PRC is at point where emigrating is harder decision unless you get high income jobs in select industries (like software engineering) vs 10/20 years ago. As for why not work in Seattle and live in a big house vs BJ shitbox? Hard to argue with that since IMO BJ kind of sucks, but there's plenty of much nicer modern cities in PRC to stick it out. Plenty of Chinese visit their friends in the west and don't care much for it, others really like having big houses and easy driving and slow living. But outside of a few tier1 western cities, wes feels more and more "backwater" vs PRC. Yes many still leave, net migration at 0.25/100k last few years vs 0.3/100k in 2010s, so ~350-400k, but what might have been double digit percentage of annual tertiary talent getting drained relative to talent production 10-20 years ago vs low single digit today. The quantity and quality of talent being retained is magnitude greater than before.

>thrive / illiberalism / big challenges

IMO above is why PRC is going to thrive because regardless of the domestic environment, the vast majority of talent simply can't leave - barring massive changes in western immigration schemes, particularly US, but that's unlikely to happen especially with respect to PRC nationals. But more broadly, on the topic of "culture", JP/SKR/TW had plenty of time to acclimate to the salaryman grind and QoL squeeze, their productivity is only going to stall and decline because they're already relatively developed and can't/won't be able replace talent at parity of loss. But their strategy worked fine for hard tech, meanwhile PRC 996 worked fine for soft tech, enough that it needed to be cracked down. Now consider PRC has 25% skilled workforce vs 60-80% of advanced economies, that's like another 2-4x Japan's worth of talent potential being spammed at 7-8M tertiary talent production per year that disproportionately bias STEM/techinical - simply far too many to be meaningfully brain drained.

And it's not like PRC or the west hasn't been going through their own host of social ills, but US S&T and innovation sectors were still growing during the GFC when the banks were foreclosing homes on the bottom quartiles. Meanwhile PRC climbed up the value chain and these S&T/innovation indexes amidst all the covid and real estate drama. That’s “thriving” in terms of building comprehensive power and it’s doing so under what folks deem terrible conditions, i.e. it’s the default momentum of upskilling millions of people per year and throwing them into the grind. Sure one can argue benchmarking against potential that's doing ok, but vs peers it's closer to thriving.

I think all the fixation on the “human condition” narrative is overstated, at the end of the day East Asian Tigers aren’t built on 40 hour work weeks. They’re built from hammering skilled human capital 200% harder than privileged west for 10% competitive advantage, and at PRC scale, that’s really enough for next several decades. Or more TLDR I think factors will enable to PRC as a country can thrive even if QoL does not.