The war for Chinese talent with David Zweig

Professor David Zweig draws on decades of research to document China’s “over-the-top” effort to gain the help of immensely talented Chinese who were living and working in the U.S., as well as the U.S. government’s harsh counterattack, and its strategy to limit and disrupt the transfer of U.S. technology to China. He offers case studies which include stories of several victims of that campaign whose cases were never made public. Zweig highlights the harm this war has done to Sino-American scientific collaboration and the education of Chinese students in America. Zweig’s book on the talent war will be published this summer.

Zweig is the leading scholar of China’s effort to build its talent pool. He’s researched Chinese studying abroad, programs to encourage them to return to China and the experiences of those who have returned. His books include Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968-1981 (1989), China’s Brain Drain to the United States (1995), Freeing China’s Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era (1997) and Internationalizing China (2002) Zweig has also co-edited New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (1991), China’s Reforms and International Political Economy (2007) and Sino-U.S. Energy Triangles (2016). Zweig is currently a distinguished visiting professor at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan. He is a chair professor emeritus at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where he taught for a quarter century and where he established its Center on China’s Transnational Relations. Zweig is a member of the USCI board of scholars and has spoken here a number of times (including “CCP and Talent Recruiting,” 2013 and “America Challenges China’s National Talent Programs,” 2020).