So when Zhejiang University offered him a generous financial package to start a lab there in December 2024, he simply couldn’t refuse. Funding for basic research in Canada is stable but quite modest, Abouheif says. The startup funds he received are “orders of magnitude more, allowing me to dream big.” He and his family moved to Hangzhou in August 2025.
“As a scientist, you want to explore the ideas that you’re most passionate about, and you want to explore them in a way that you feel like you have unlimited possibilities,” Abouheif says. “That’s what will get a researcher to move, regardless of where the institution is — to have that feeling. … It’s so exciting to be in this position and to be able to put together this kind of synthesis.”
Up until about 10 years ago, Abouheif didn’t see many papers in his field coming out of China. But then there was a marked shift: “You start seeing just some amazing work. And now, it’s incredible how many top-quality papers are coming out of China,” Abouheif says.
In fact, the United States now trails behind China in the number of publications in high-impact journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell — a meaningful, albeit imperfect, measure of scientific productivity and influence. Now Chinese universities dominate the top spots in international rankings while American universities are slipping.
Another sign of China’s rise is that many more scientists of Chinese descent who came to the United States to train and then build their careers are moving back to China. But it is one thing for scientists of Chinese origin to return home; it is another for China to attract foreign talent with no prior connection to the country.
At this stage, it is unclear how many scientists who are not of Chinese descent are choosing to move to China. I spoke to three of them, and it’s an open question whether these scientists are oddballs or trendsetters; whether their decision to move to China foretells a deeper shift in the world’s center of gravity for scientific research.
The question hinges, at least in part, on how many scientists will be willing to forgo some of the freedoms in the west — such as the ability to express political dissent — in exchange for opportunities to do great science.
But with federal support for scientific research now unpredictable in the United States, and as Europe increasingly invests in its military defense (possibly at the expense of basic science), a brain drain to China may be possible in the coming years.
Hugo Darras is a French scientist who recently joined Zhejiang University from the University of Mainz in Germany, where he was a junior group leader studying evolutionary genomics in insects. He says that one draw for him was the Chinese students. “In Europe, it has become very difficult to find students that are motivated to do research,” Darras says. “The students that have a passion for their projects are very difficult to find, and that’s very frustrating.” In contrast, he’s found that in China, the students are enthusiastic and work extremely hard.
Darras is funded through the Excellent Young Scientists Fund, a program organized by China’s National Science Foundation to support tenure-track investigators. The grant gives him the equivalent of about 400,000 euros (roughly $475,000), which is matched by the university, bringing the total up to about 800,000 euros of startup funds. This is highly competitive, given that PhD students in China are very affordable to hire and train. In addition, the cost of DNA sequencing is only about 10 percent of what it is in Europe, Darras says. In Germany, he’d think hard about whether he could afford to send 15 samples for sequencing. In China, he can send 1,000 samples for sequencing without thinking twice.
“That completely changes the kind of research one can do,” Darras says. He adds that Chinese scientists “are going in directions that are completely different from what Europe and America are doing,” and the opportunity to take his research in new directions attracted him.
Siegfried Roth, a German researcher studying the evolution and development of insects at the University of Cologne, recently retired at age 67 due to Germany’s strict retirement rules. But he still had research questions he wanted to answer. “At the end of your career, you are very rarely in the position that you have solved all the questions which were on your heart and which you wanted to finish,” he says. The opportunity to do research in China offered a chance to pursue “some of the questions I had — even some of the bigger ones, which we got close to answering but couldn’t.”
Roth found a position at Shanxi University in Taiyuan through the “Silver Hair” program, which is geared toward researchers who are retiring or recently retired. The program provides him with three years of funding: a salary, funds to hire students and postdocs, and funds to buy scientific instruments. It also comes with funds to organize an international scientific meeting and support to invite foreign scientists for a sabbatical.
Roth first visited China at the invitation of a Chinese researcher whom he had hosted in his lab in Germany many years before when she was in training. She returned to China and became a tenured professor, and later invited Roth and his wife, also a scientist, back to visit and give a seminar. That got the wheels turning. He noticed how over the last decade, China has developed into a “very, very attractive research country.”
Like Abouheif and Darras, Roth says “there’s a lot of things possible here that I never could have done in Germany.” For example, China has a long history of studying locusts, a major agricultural pest. Roth took advantage of that to initiate some comparative work on locusts that he wouldn’t have done in Germany.
He was surprised at the amount of freedom he was given to study whatever he thought would be most interesting. The main thing that the universities care about is the researchers’ ability to publish in high-ranking journals. Publishing high-impact papers is often incentivized financially. And although journal prestige can be a problematic way to measure impact, this system “has a very positive consequence — namely, that you can do anything you want if you do it so good that it goes into a high-ranking journal,” Roth says.
The researchers I spoke to say their main friction point is the language barrier. At Zhejiang University, Abouheif says that all the research is done in English without any issue, but most of the administrative tasks require Chinese. He and Darras both have assistants to help with that. Off campus, it can be more challenging. “If you ask me what I miss the most, what I miss the most is actually the banter on the street — I’m a people person,” Abouheif says. In Montreal, he enjoyed the chitchat with the doorman, the cashier at the corner store, the taxi driver, the barber. “All those small social interactions, [I] want to be able to do that in Chinese eventually.”
At Shanxi University, which is in a smaller town than Zhejiang University, Roth noticed Chinese students communicating in English with the assistance of AI programs for translation and writing — but they cannot understand a word of spoken English. “This is a new phenomenon to me, which I did not expect,” Roth says. “So one might have to consider that if one goes there, English proficiency is not as general as you would expect.”
In spite of this, both Abouheif and Roth said they appreciate the warmth and hospitality of the Chinese people, the cleanliness and safety of the country, and the diversity, “colorfulness,” and “joie de vivre” that they see around them.
“The conceptions I had of China when I was reading the media and what you see when you actually experience it when you’re here are two different things completely,” Abouheif says.