The Chinese government is extending offers to scientists in the U.S. to relocate and work in China in exchange for job security, according to The New York Times.
Ardem Patapoutian, a scientist for Scripps Research and a Nobel Prize winner, was offered to move his lab to “any city, [or] any university” in China that he preferred with guaranteed funding for 20 years after he announced on Bluesky that his federal research funding had been frozen, the NYT reported. Though Patapoutian rejected the offer, foreign policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the offer raises clear national security concerns.
“[China is] on the hunt. It’s grotesquely opportunistic, and [members of the Chinese Communist Party] will lie, cheat, steal, pay off, pay, deploy to attain and maintain any advantage over the United States and the West. This is asymmetric warfare,” former U.S. ambassador Joseph Cella told the DCNF. “They will do whatever it takes to reach the top of the unipolar world. That’s their design and they will do whatever it takes to get there.”
“The elephant in the room … is that the overwhelming number of Chinese students, scholars and researchers have allegiance only to the Chinese Communist Party, and this undermines our national security,” Cella continued. Chinese researchers can be coerced by the state if they do not comply with a national security law that essentially requires them to cooperate with certain Chinese government directives, Cella said.
As President Donald Trump’s administration makes cuts to the federal bureaucracy, significant amounts of grant funding that many scientific researchers draw on have been frozen or terminated. Hours after Patapoutian announced that his lab’s grant on developing new approaches to pain relief had been frozen in February, he received an email from China with the offer, he told the NYT.
Some researchers have been seeking professional opportunities abroad since Trump took office and started cutting federal funding, according to an analysis by Nature. Recruiters from China have been posting ads on social media platforms targeting U.S. scientists, urging them to “pursue career development and entrepreneurship” in mainland China, Politico reported in March.
Notably, several universities in Hong Kong have been looking to hire Harvard students following the Trump administration’s ban on international pupils at the college, according to Nature.
“The Chinese Communist Party wants to steal its way to global supremacy and has long pursued a program to leap ahead of the U.S. by stealing our technology and our technologists,” founder and CEO of State Armor Michael Lucci told the DCNF. “We must decisively destroy all CCP crookery … They will make every effort to poach American talent and intellectual property, which is why legislators and law enforcement must crack down on CCP espionage and impose tremendous punishments on those that collaborate with the CCP to sell out the USA.”
Lucci added that the CCP’s thousand talents program has “coopted lead researchers from our universities and executed a campaign of corporate espionage focused on bio research.”
A 2018 White House report found that China stole “between $180 billion and $540 billion annually” in intellectual property. A 2024 House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party report found that “hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. federal research funding over the last decade has contributed to China’s technological advancements and military modernization.”
The 2024 report also found that partnerships between Chinese and American educational institutions have served as “conduits for transferring critical U.S. technologies and expertise to China.”
Moreover, Trump wrote that “rivals abroad seek to usurp” the United States in scientific research and directed him to “recaptur[e] the urgency which propelled us so far in the last century” in a March 26 letter to president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios.
Patapoutian and the Chinese embassy did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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