The United States must mobilize its reserves of scientific talent with wartime urgency to compete with China's brain gain campaign.
China's leader, Xi Jinping, has initiated a strategic campaign to dominate the global scientific landscape. He has explicitly directed China's scientific and educational institutions to produce elite scientists, researchers, and engineers who will spearhead China's transformation into a technological superpower with direct military applications. Xi has unambiguously designated human talent as China's "primary resource" and acknowledged that China's "overall competitiveness is the competitiveness of its skilled personnel."
To execute this strategic mandate, Beijing is aggressively deploying unprecedented financial resources and comprehensive support mechanisms to enhance China's STEM education capabilities and incentivize highly skilled personnel to join Chinese state-sponsored research organizations. Xi's unmistakable objective is to defeat the United States in the critical battlefield of technological innovation by constructing what amounts to the world's largest and most formidable army of scientists and engineers -- a direct challenge to America's technological hegemony.
The United States faces an existential imperative to not merely maintain but decisively strengthen its position at the apex of global technological leadership. This requires mobilizing American scientific talent with wartime urgency, implementing robust incentive structures to channel our brightest minds into critical national security research, and substantially increasing investments in breakthrough technologies that will ensure both economic prosperity and overwhelming military advantage in the decades ahead.
America's strategic research organizations -- particularly the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and NASA's Science Mission Directorate -- constitute the front lines of this technological confrontation. These institutions have historically delivered decisive technological advantages through groundbreaking innovations ranging from 3D printing to LASIK eye surgery to MRI machines -- technologies that have revolutionized both civilian industries and military capabilities.
Realizing the strength, vitality, and impact of NSF investments, Congress created the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) directorate a few years ago to specifically accelerate the pace of innovation, more rapidly bringing new technologies to the market, resulting in economic growth, job creation, and long-term U.S. competitiveness.
Critically, America must also leverage one of its most powerful strategic advantages: our ability to attract and retain the world's premier foreign STEM talent. The United States has historically served as the global destination of choice for exceptional scientists, engineers, and researchers seeking freedom and opportunity. This brain gain has substantially augmented our technological capabilities while simultaneously denying these human resources to strategic competitors.
Beijing recognizes this advantage and is aggressively implementing policies to reverse this talent flow. We must counter with streamlined visa processes for advanced degree holders, accelerated pathways for STEM graduates as President Trump has called for, and enhanced research opportunities that make America irresistible to global technological talent.
These technological breakthroughs emerged from the strategic combination of sustained public funding for long-horizon research and the critical mass of exceptional talent within these institutions. Assembling this elite scientific workforce represents the most challenging aspect of establishing a dominant research ecosystem -- and paradoxically, the component most vulnerable to rapid degradation.
In advanced technology domains critical to national security, many researchers accept reduced compensation in exchange for the opportunity to contribute directly to America's technological supremacy. Violating this implicit national service contract would inflict generational damage to our research capabilities -- a strategic vulnerability that China is explicitly positioning itself to exploit through its massive investments in developing talent and constructing world-class research clusters dedicated to state-directed technological advancement.
The consequences of strategic negligence extend beyond handicapping America's future technological competitiveness -- they directly strengthen our primary adversary. Chinese entities have systematically targeted displaced American technology workers for recruitment, particularly those with experience in government research agencies or advanced technology companies. China's talent acquisition programs have evolved and expanded since Washington identified the Thousand Talents Program as a national security concern in 2019.
Beijing has refined these operations and developed increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to extract foreign expertise for Chinese research institutions through comprehensive incentive packages. Any significant reduction in American research personnel or funding will only accelerate this technology transfer to our principal strategic competitor.
If China represents America's primary adversary in the twenty-first century, and technological superiority constitutes the decisive domain of competition, then America's scientists and engineers represent the front-line forces in this strategic confrontation. These technological "warfighters" operate within organizations like NSF and NASA, functioning in coordinated but distinct capacities from their counterparts in private technology companies. This public-private technological ecosystem represents an integrated whole -- neither element can achieve strategic objectives without the other.
The technological arms race has begun in earnest. America must respond with clarity, resolve, and strategic investment, or risk permanent subordination in the technological hierarchy that will determine global power in this century.
About the Authors: Alex Rubin and Divyansh Kaushik
Alex Rubin was a leading analyst covering China technology issues at the CIA's China Mission Center for ten years until January.
Divyansh Kaushik is a technology and national security policy researcher and is a non-resident senior fellow at American Policy Ventures.