Comment by wrs
16 hours ago
We can only hope this administration and its supporters are a temporary aberration that the US can claw its way back out of. Otherwise, that classic advice to sign up your kids for Mandarin class starts to sound pretty good.
Why would moving to an even more authoritarian country be good advice? What?
Because if you want to get a good science education, you need to be in a place that supports science and education. The administration has disrupted the system that made the US the world scientific leader, a status it’s had only since the mid-20th century, which it achieved through concerted government and social investment. Which country is doing that right now?
In 1930, if you wanted access to the great science universities and literature, you learned German. Things can change. Quickly.
B/c the next Carnegie Mellon will be there
The point is you'll be doing business in high technology with China, not America. Helps to speak the language when you negotiate.
I find this quite true in my field. Recently I attended the biggest conference in computer vision (CVPR), and almost half the time I was there, I heard Chinese instead of English. Most people I met joked that we should learn Mandarin if we want to continue doing AI research now.
America isn’t the only place that speaks English. It’s the global standard language. When a Japanese and a Chinese person negotiate they are already using English.
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I disagree with that.
Instead we are seeing increased siloing of scientific domains. The EU is cracking down on EU-Chinese research cooperation (as recent arrests and deportations in France have shown), India still has a de facto freeze on Chinese R&D and China is still enforcing export controls on IP to India, and South Korea and Japan are still controlling any IP generated from their industrial research fusion programs.
We're instead seeing at least 6-7 different scientific and capital ecosystems forming, and with collaboration being tightly controlled by governments.
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Kids may want to learn Chinese for the same reason they may want to learn Arabic or Spanish. It helps doing business in some parts of the world.
But China is not going to be the dominant superpower (except maybe if they manage to beat the rest of the world in AI). Their labor force is already in decline, which means they must gradually shift their focus from building the future to maintaining the society. Like Europe and Japan are already doing.
As opposed to the US, where the labor market will magically start growing net of immigration?
If people don’t want to move to the US, then America will get the same treatment.
Just curious, but is there any evidence that Chinese/Indian/etc will even be as open to US students as the US has been to them? I have no knowledge of what their intentions may be, but I think it’s a pretty large assumption that they would even take American students at all
American here who went to a Chinese (grad) school for CS and was admitted to every Chinese school I applied to. This is very much a possible route, if you’re appropriately qualified for the program. The main issue is language: outside of HK, programs in English are rare.
That's extremely impressive that you managed to reach such a high level of fluency. I find written and technical Chinese is extremely tricky and different from spoken Chinese
PKU and Tisnghua both have overseas student programs and they are particularly eager to have qualified takers. Now, the question is how far does that go when the schools really become popular undergrad and grad STEM studies?
The bigger problem is that schools like MIT, Stanford, UCB, UCI throw (or threw?) lots of resources at students that Chinese schools didn't really do (and maybe still don't? My info is 10 years out of date). Even the lower ranked schools have ample resources and fairly well paying TA/RA-ships available. In China, you would have to work for your professor's side company to get money, and the professor might not let you graduate if you were doing a good job (again, 10 years ago, I have no idea what its like today, China is changing quickly).
I would find it hard to imagine they wouldn't welcome foreign students just for the fact that there are so few in comparison to start with. Even if tons of US kids started going to China for college, they would always remain a tiny fraction of students due to the population size disparity.
> Chinese/Indian/etc will even be as open to US students as the US has been to them
India has been opening campuses abroad like IIT Madras in Tanzania [0] and IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi [1] to cater specifically to building that kind of relationship in Africa and MENA. The majority of seats allocated (66%) are for foreign nationals.
Top Indian programs like IIT Delhi have been very active giving fellowships and subsidises for students and researchers from ASEAN [2], the African Union [3], Pacific Island nations [4], and Afghanistan [5]
And Vietnam would do similar programs as well for poorer ASEAN nations and a number of African countries (notably Angola and Mozambique) as well as Cuba
Japan has been running a multi-decade long international student and R&D collaboration program that helped jumpstart South Korea and China's R&D capacity in the 1980s and 1990s, along with much of ASEAN's more recently (my SO is a product of that). Same with South Korea as well.
[0] - https://www.iitmz.ac.in/
[1] - https://abudhabi.iitd.ac.in/
[2] - https://asean.iitd.ac.in/
[3] - https://www.itecgoi.in/index
[4] - https://www.itecgoi.in/Sagaramrut
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-14/india-off...
Looking at the history of US leads to the depressing conclusion that this administration is not an aberration but is instead a return to the same old shit from 150 years ago.
Welcome to literal conservatism.
You mean reactionism. A conservative wants to keep the status quo. A reactionary wants to regress to a previous status quo (i.e. perhaps from 150 years ago).
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