BEIJING — Scientists in the United States were not overly surprised in 2008 when the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland awarded a $10 million research grant to a Princeton University molecular biologist, Shi Yigong.
Dr. Shi’s cell studies had already opened a new line of research into cancer treatment. At Princeton, his laboratory occupied an entire floor and had a $2 million annual budget.
The surprise — shock, actually — came a few months later, when Dr. Shi, a naturalized American citizen and 18-year resident of the United States, announced that he was leaving for good to pursue science in China. He declined the grant, resigned from Princeton’s faculty and become the dean of life sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“To this day, many people don’t understand why I came back to China,” he said recently between a crush of visitors to his Tsinghua office. “Especially in my position, giving up all I had.”
“He was one of our stars,” Robert H. Austin, a Princeton physics professor, said by telephone. “I thought it was completely crazy.”
China’s leaders do not. Determined to reverse the drain of top talent that accompanied its opening to the outside world over the past three decades, they are using their now ample financial resources — and a dollop of national pride — to entice scientists and scholars home.
The West, and the United States in particular, remain more attractive places for many Chinese scholars to study and do research. But the return of Dr. Shi and some other high-profile scientists is a sign that China is succeeding more quickly than many experts expected at narrowing the gap that separates it from technologically advanced nations.
China’s spending on research and development has steadily increased for a decade and now amounts to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product. The United States devotes 2.7 percent of its G.D.P. to research and development, but China’s share is far higher than that of most other developing countries.
Chinese scientists are also under more pressure to compete with those abroad, and in the past decade they quadrupled the number of scientific papers they published a year. Their 2007 total was second only to that of the United States. About 5,000 Chinese scientists are engaged in the emerging field of nanotechnology alone, according to a recent book, “China’s Emerging Technological Edge,” by Denis Fred Simon and Cong Cao, two United States-based experts on China.
A 2008 study by the Georgia Institute of Technology concluded that within the next decade or two, China would pass the United States in its ability to transform its research and development into products and services that can be marketed to the world.
“As China becomes more proficient at innovation processes linking its burgeoning R.&D. to commercial enterprises, watch out,” the study concluded.
Quantity is not quality, and despite its huge investment, China still struggles in many areas of science and technology. No Chinese-born scientist has ever been awarded a Nobel Prize for research conducted in mainland China, although several have received one for work done in the West. While climbing, China ranked only 10th in the number of patents granted in the United States in 2008.
Chinese students continue to leave in droves. Nearly 180,000 left in 2008, almost 25 percent more than in 2007, as more families were able to pay overseas tuition. For every four students who left in the past decade, only one returned, Chinese government statistics show. Those who obtained science or engineering doctorates from American universities were among the least likely to return.
Recently, though, China has begun to exert a reverse pull. In the past three years, renowned scientists like Dr. Shi have begun to trickle back. And they are returning with a mission: to shake up China’s scientific culture of cronyism and mediocrity, often cited as its biggest impediment to scientific achievement.
They are lured by their patriotism, their desire to serve as catalysts for change and their belief that the Chinese government will back them.
“I felt I owed China something,” said Dr. Shi, 42, who is described by Tsinghua students as caring and intensely driven. “In the United States, everything is more or less set up. Whatever I do here, the impact is probably tenfold, or a hundredfold.”
He and others like him left the United States with fewer regrets than some Americans might assume. While he was courted by a clutch of top American universities and rose swiftly through Princeton’s academic ranks, Dr. Shi said he believed many Asians confronted a glass ceiling in the United States.
Rao Yi, a 47-year-old biologist who left Northwestern University in 2007 to become dean of the School of Life Sciences at Peking University in Beijing, contrasts China’s “soul-searching” with America’s self-satisfaction. When the United States Embassy in Beijing asked him to explain why he wanted to renounce his American citizenship, he wrote that the United States had lost its moral leadership after the 9/11 attacks. But “the American people are still reveling in the greatness of the country and themselves,” he said in a draft letter.
These scientists were not uniformly won over by the virtues of democracy, either. While Dr. Rao said he hoped and believed that China would become a multiparty democracy in his lifetime, Dr. Shi said he doubted that that political system “will ever be appropriate for China.”
As a Tsinghua student, Dr. Shi joined the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. As a registered Democrat in the United States, he participated eagerly in elections. “Multiparty democracy is perfect for the United States,” he said. “But believing that multiparty democracy is right for the United States does not mean it is right for China.”
Yet the re-entry to the politicized world of science in China can be challenging. Some scientists with weaker résumés have shunned returnees. In its biennial election of academicians last month, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China’s highest advisory body on science and technology, passed over Dr. Shi and Dr. Rao. It also did not recognize Wang Xiaodong, a well-known Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who recently left the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas for Beijing’s National Institute of Biological Sciences.
The tension has spilled over into the Chinese blogosphere, where Dr. Shi has been attacked as insincere and untrustworthy. In a posting in 2008, Liu Zhongwu, a professor of science and engineering at South China University of Technology, said that Dr. Shi should be excluded from any projects that touch on China’s national interests. “Bear in mind, he is a foreigner,” he wrote.
“The last year and a half have been like 10 years to me,” said Dr. Shi, who says the criticism is redolent of the Cultural Revolution. “I am rejoicing that I am still standing.”
But the returnees also have powerful friends, including their universities’ presidents and some officials within the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Dr. Shi and Dr. Rao helped draft the party’s new program to hire top-flight overseas scientists, entrepreneurs and other experts — the latest incarnation of the government’s campaign to lure its scholars home.
In May 2008, Dr. Shi was invited to speak about the future of Chinese science and technology to Vice President Xi Jinping and other high-ranking officials at Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing.
Dr. Rao says the government is generous — maybe overly so — in financing science. The challenge, he said, is making sure that the funds are spent wisely, not simply handed over to those in bureaucratic favor.
Five years ago, as head of a scientific institute at Northwestern University, he made the same argument in the British journal Nature. Dr. Rao wrote that connections too often trumped merit when grants were handed out in China. He recommended abolishing the Ministry of Science and Technology and reassigning its budget to a “more reputable” agency.
His critique was banned in China. But last October, China Daily, the state-run English-language newspaper, summarized it in a profile of Dr. Rao headlined “A Man With a Mission.”
“It is going to be an uphill battle,” said Mr. Cao, an author of the book on China. “They are excellent scientists. But they must form a critical mass to reform the system. If they don’t reform it, they will leave.”
At Tsinghua, Dr. Shi says he is optimistic. In less than two years, he has recruited about 18 postdoctoral fellows, almost all from the United States. Each has opened an independent laboratory. Within a decade, he said, Tsinghua’s life sciences department will expand fourfold.
Dr. Shi does not pretend that science there is now on a par with Princeton. Rather, he likens Tsinghua to a respected American state university.
But “in a matter of years,” he said, “we will get there.”
