China's relationship with foreign scientific powers is changing rapidly

"Deng Xiaoping's 1979 visit to the United States heralded a new era of economic and scientific exchange between China and the United States. Xiaoping, then the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, famously donned an iconic cowboy hat at a rodeo in Simonton, Texas. Simon Marginson, a social scientist at the University of Bristol, UK, describes the trip as "rapport-building", cementing the return of full diplomatic relations after a long period of hostility."

"When Cong Cao, a social scientist at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, decided to investigate the bibliographic impact of the new US-China relationship, he expected that foreign-educated academics would have increasingly important roles as elite members of China's scientific academies. He covered the subject in his PhD thesis and in a 2004 book called China's Scientific Elite."

"A study, published in Nature Human Behaviour and co-authored by Cao, found that China's opening in the late 1970s and 1980s did indeed bring US and Chinese researchers together, and that Chinese scientists who worked in both countries were more likely to become mid-level or senior researchers at both elite and non-elite universities in China, but that this cross-fertilization is not reflected in China's elite science academies."

Deng Xiaoping's 1979 US visit initiated a new era of economic and scientific exchange and contributed to restored diplomatic ties. Cong Cao investigated the bibliographic impact of the revived US–China relationship and documented the topic in a PhD thesis and a 2004 book, China's Scientific Elite. China's opening in the late 1970s and 1980s connected US and Chinese researchers and increased the likelihood that scientists with experience in both countries would attain mid-level and senior university positions in China. That cross-fertilization, however, has not translated into proportional representation within the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, where domestically educated scholars now predominate in leadership roles.

Read at Nature