China’s state-run Global Times on Monday published a gloating editorial about “shifting global talent flows” that are leading a “growing number of Chinese scientific and technological talents opting to return home” after having emigrated to the United States.
The marquee exhibit for this contention was Yang Zhilin, the 34-year-old CEO of Chinese startup company Moonshot AI, which just debuted its latest artificial intelligence product, Kimi K3.
Kimi K3 has been touted as China’s closest approach to the power of top American AI systems, a surprising leap in technology from an upstart young company. Yang was born in Guangdong, China, and took classes at Tsinghua University before moving to the United States to study at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
Yang’s teachers at Carnegie Mellon included two of the world’s top AI researchers, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and William Cohen. The Global Times was delighted to note that Salakhutdinov “respected” Yang’s decision to take what he learned about AI in the United States and return to Communist China to found his own startup company.
The Global Times also gleefully quoted Salakhutdinov’s remark that the U.S. immigration process can be “quite intimidating and uncertain.” Of course, China’s “immigration process” is extremely “intimidating and uncertain” – as in, virtually non-existent – for everyone except top talent that the Communist Party wants to poach.
The Global Times also claimed America’s security concerns about Chinese espionage – or “the systematic targeting of Chinese and Chinese-American researchers in the U.S.” – is driving more tech talent into China’s arms.
This lament included a House Republican bill to deny visas and study programs to Chinese nationals, which is a tricky criticism to make in the same article that sang the praises of a Chinese national who used U.S. schools to get a top-shelf education and then went back to China.
According to the Global Times, Chinese students won’t need to raid American universities for cutting-edge training much longer because China’s schools are allegedly becoming the destination of choice for international students:
Studying in China is also becoming an increasingly attractive option for young people worldwide. According to domestic media outlet Chinatoday.com, 380,000 international students from 191 countries and regions were studying in China in the 2024-25 academic year. Graduate students accounted for 35 percent of the total, with engineering being the most popular field of study.
The challenging issue lying beneath the Global Times’ boosterism for China is that it would be almost politically impossible for America to do what Beijing has done: slam the border doors shut in the face of mass migration and refugee floods, but roll out the red carpet for exceptional talents, with copious incentives for them to remain in America after studying at American universities.
China’s approach is not terribly different from how the U.S. approached immigration until the 1960s, when the current notion of open borders and mass migration took root. In our current climate, any suggestion of emulating the Chinese approach would be shot down as heartless opportunism and xenophobia.
Salakhutdinov gave an interview to Business Insider on Thursday in which he praised Yang Zhilin as a generational talent, gifted with the “unusual independence, original thinking, rare technical breadth, and the ambition to take risks” that are needed for success in the rapidly evolving AI industry.
The Carnegie Mellon professor recalled warning his genius protege that starting up his own company was a big risk. “You can go, you can try building a company, and if it doesn’t go anywhere, then your career can suffer,” he told Yang.
The bigger question might be how the qualities Salakhutdinov so admired will fare over the long term in a brutal authoritarian dictatorship. Beijing desperately wants to take the global lead in AI, so it is throwing bags of cash at big-name developers and promising them the freedom to develop cutting-edge products — but that freedom will end very abruptly, even for a millennial genius like Yang Zhilin, if he does anything the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t like.
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