Beijing’s AI dominance may depend on how many US-educated Chinese want to return home

This article is co-written by Coco Feng.

After working in the US for more than a decade, Zheng Yefeng felt he had hit a glass ceiling. He also saw that the gap in AI between China and the US was narrowing.

Last year, Zheng, who worked as a researcher at Siemens Healthcare in New Jersey, made a decision that addressed both problems. He accepted an offer to head up the medical research and development team at Tencent’s YouTu AI lab in Shenzhen, known as China’s Silicon Valley.

“There was almost no room for promotion if I stayed in the US,” he said, expressing a common dilemma faced by experienced Chinese tech workers in America.

With the US-China trade war leading to tighter scrutiny of Chinese nationals working in the US tech industry, people like Zheng are moving back to China to work in the burgeoning AI sector, especially after Beijing designated AI a national priority. The technology’s varied applications have attracted billions of dollars of venture capital investment, created highly valued startups like SenseTime and Bytedance, and sparked a talent war among companies.

That has created an odd symbiotic relationship between the two countries vying for AI supremacy. The US, with its superior higher education system, is the training ground for Chinese AI scientists like Zheng, who obtained a doctor’s degree from the University of Maryland after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at China’s premier Tsinghua University.

“Many professors in China have great academic ability, but in terms of the number [of top professors], the US is ahead,” said Luo Guojie, who himself accepted an offer from Peking University to become an assistant professor after studying computer science in the US.

Among international students majoring in computer science and maths in US universities, Chinese nationals were the third-largest group behind Indians and Nepalese in the 2018-2019 academic year, representing 19.9%, according to the Institute of International Education.

Photo credit: Gavin Tracy

The South China Morning Post spoke with several Chinese AI engineers who decided to stay and work in the US after their studies. They only agreed to give their surnames because of the sensitivity of the issues being discussed.

A 25-year-old Beijinger surnamed Lin graduated from one of China’s best engineering schools in the capital before heading to a US university for a master’s degree in computer science in 2017. Like some of his peers, he found the teaching methods in China to be outdated.

“It’s hard to imagine that a final exam of a coding course still asked you to handwrite code, instead of running and testing it on a computer,” said Lin, who now works as a software engineer for Google in Silicon Valley.

“Although we still had to take writing tests [in the US], we had many practical opportunities in the lab and could do our own projects,” he added.

A Facebook software engineer surnamed Zhuang had a similar experience at his university in Shanghai.