America is foolishly waving goodbye to thousands of Chinese boffins

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. CHINESE-BORN brainiacs have long been at the forefront of innovation in America. Yang Chen-Ning, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist who died in October, was one such.

But a mixture of pushes (such as the hostility of Donald Trump’s administration to all sorts of newcomers) and pulls (including China’s lavish support for science and tech) mean many are now following the path Yang took later in life: he returned to China in his 80s to teach at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Today, a host of Chinese youngsters are also choosing not to go to America to study at all. These shifts have been under way since Mr Trump’s first administration and are now striking among three overlapping groups: students, scientists and tech types.

They stand to harm both America’s best universities and its most innovative firms. Chinese-born boffins have long made up the largest group of foreign researchers in America. An exodus just now, as the world’s two largest economies are locked in bitter trade conflict, will erode one of America’s biggest advantages in its technological rivalry with China: its ability to lure and keep superstars.

Not that the Trump administration appears to see it that way. In May Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, said America would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students." (Mr Trump later said he wanted 600,000 more of them in a distinctly confusing addition to the debate.) In September a congressional committee released a report titled “From PhD to PLA", calling for tighter restrictions on Chinese students, citing their possible future links with China’s armed forces. That month Mr Trump proposed a charge of $100,000 on new applications for H1-B visas, which are heavily