like a decade ago, i heard some top tier faculty recounting two different academic trips to China. these were two white women, garden variety social democrats that are highly productive researchers in applied ecology (an earnest but hardscrabble field) that took two completely different trips in different years touring different institutions in China.

they both said they got to see these amazing facilities with lots of resources / support available for researchers, like they were being actively recruited to come there. they each asked, “well, what are the research questions you want investigated?” and the answer was always some form of “that is up to the research scientist.”

neither of them could wrap their heads around having that much institutional and material support coupled with the full freedom to investigate precisely what they wanted (not beholden to or competing with others in their fields for the limited resources of various foundations/funders or having to spend countless hours on accountability/impact metrics for reporting).

before all the covid shit and the weird cooling effects of sinophobia ramped up, there was a program where i could literally go get a PhD in china from a huge list of universities, where all of my classes would be in english, i would get housing/stipend enough to not have to work, and it would cost me nothing nor would i have to commit to working there for any amount of time after graduating. i just had to like get good grades and not do crimes.

i told some chuddy grad student i knew about it and even he was like, “what the hell.” i told him they are going to make us look like cave people within a few decades.