Anonymous contributor “Masa Rick” returns to ChinaTalk. Last year, Masa Rick discussed China’s growing interest in the Middle East. Today’s report assesses how the UAE in particular has been responding China’s advances toward the region.
The United Arab Emirates has emerged as a formidable player in artificial intelligence, leveraging its immense financial resources, influence over the Global South, and a deliberate balance between the United States and China.
So when Emarati tech-investment firm MGX joined the likes of OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle in pledging $7 billion to Stargate, the move was perceived as the UAE pivoting away from Chinese partnerships and toward the United States. Has the swing vote officially been cast?
The reality is more complex. This report examines China’s strategic interests in the UAE, the UAE’s need for Chinese expertise, and whether Abu Dhabi is genuinely decoupling from Beijing or simply playing both sides to maximize its AI dominance. The evidence shows that the UAE is still probably playing both sides: leaning toward the US for access to chips, while hedging their bets with Chinese brains.
Current landscape: why is the UAE working with China?
The stereotype in China toward the Middle East goes something like this: “the deep-pocketed, oil-rich gulf countries will invest in anything that helps them diversify their economies away from oil.” But that stereotype obscures more than it reveals. The UAE, in particular, is not simply throwing money at Chinese firms. Rather, it demands the best technology, regulatory clarity, and alignment with its national priorities to boost its domestic growth (indigenization). Chinese PE/VC executives who go to Abu Dhabi to raise capital often lament the Western preference that Middle Eastern elites seem to have: after all, most Emirati elites were educated in the UK or other Western countries.
The UAE also prefers sustainability over quick results. As Hazem Ben-Gacem, former co-CEO of Investcorp (a global-investment firm backed by the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala), put it, Emirati investment patterns can be summed up in three concepts: “patience,” “strategically distributed,” and “long term.” That approach hardly aligns with the interests of Chinese investors, who have little interest in ending up “trapped” in the UAE.
Caixin: “Cross-regional investment of private equity in the Middle East and Asia”; red = “Middle East deals involving Asian investors”; black = “Asian deals involving Middle Eastern investors”; 100亿美元 = US$10 billion
Even so, the UAE’s pickiness does not imply that it will stop engaging with China in developing its AI capacity. The UAE’s sovereign wealth funds, for example, are still prime targets for Chinese firms seeking capital — especially as China’s AI sector faces mounting financial pressures due to US sanctions and chip export controls.
In February 2024, Emirati AI firm G42 was prompted by the US government to divest from China — but that $105 billion investment was simply transferred to another Emirati investment vehicle called Lunate, an arm of the Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s business empire. Given Lunate’s significant investments in Chinese firms, a CSIS team led by Greg Allen argued in a January report that this spinoff represents more of a reorganization than true divestment. So far, their argument has aged well: in the past few weeks, Lunate’s holding in Alibaba has increased to 30.48%.
The UAE government has also continued its engagement with China in the telecom sector — which doesn’t exactly scream divestment from China, either. According to the CSIS report,
Huawei and UAE’s state-owned telecommunications company e& launched a 5G cloud edge computing platform called 5G Edge Box. The announcement came just months after e& launched a similar 5G edge cloud computing platform with Microsoft.
The UAE and other nondemocratic gulf states are also prime targets for Chinese cooperation because of their shared disregard for environmental regulations and human rights (exemplified by recent China-UAE joint military exercises in Xinjiang of all places). Rather than navigating Western restrictions, China and the UAE can remain focused on “pragmatic cooperation” — as well as extending non-Western tech capacity (like building data centers) and norms (like setting data-security standards) to the Global South.
The UAE, in other words, is no bystander in the global AI race.
Is the next DeepSeek going to be Emirati?
Investment is only half the picture. China and the UAE show no signs of slowing down their academic and research cooperation — as evidenced by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the only AI institution in the world where Chinese researchers dominate the academic roster.
The jury is still out on whether MBZUAI’s AI investments will ultimately boost the UAE’s tech capabilities. But in light of DeepSeek’s success with a small team of engineers from a very short list of Chinese universities, it’s not farfetched to imagine a major leap in AI innovation coming out of MBZUAI in the near future.
Since its founding in 2019, MBZUAI has been massively alluring to top-notch Chinese scholars for several reasons:
Chinese researchers, especially in STEM, face growing US scrutiny over espionage and national-security concerns. MBZUAI lets US-trained Chinese researchers work without these constraints.
MBZUAI has resources. A Chinese source claims MBZUAI “is equipped with top-tier GPU facilities, including over 800 NVIDIA GPUs, 400 A100 GPUs, and 400 V100 GPUs.”
And MBZUAI has Eric Xing, the university’s president since 2021 and a leading voice in ML research. With someone of his stature at the helm, his position not only attracts significant talent from top-tier institutions, but also legitimizes UAE’s intentions. For example, Xing was recently spotted in Paris, meeting French officials and forging connections with French institutions to launch their AI initiatives in Europe.
MBZUAI has assembled a star roster of Chinese researchers, some of whom were Professor Xing’s advisees and others well-known within their respective fields. Of the 77 current faculty members on their directory, 25 are from mainland China, and three more are from Taiwan — including a Taiwanese-German “celebrity” scholar. The inclusion of Taiwanese professors seems to be highly intentional, too. Tei-Wei Kuo 郭大維, one of the Taiwanese professors, recently resigned from the board of Foxconn; now he can bring his insights on semiconductor supply chain management to Abu Dhabi. (A full list of all current Chinese and Taiwanese faculty at MBZUAI is produced at the end of this article.)
The composition of MBZUAI’s board of trustees also provides insights into UAE’s intentions on AI innovations: it’s a top-down initiative with immense financial resources and unlimited partnership possibilities (as seen by, for instance, Lisa Su’s entry and Li-Kai Fu’s exit).
Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak (chair)
Corporate Positions:
Managing Director and Group Chief Executive Officer, Mubadala Investment Company (sovereign fund)
Board Positions:
Vice Chairman, MGX
G42 (Board Director)
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank
Emirates Global Aluminium
Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)
Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation
New York University Board of Trustees (instrumental in establishing NYU Abu Dhabi Campus as well)
Governmental:
Chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority ( Serving as an Advisor of MbZ, President of UAE)
Presidential Special Envoy to China
Jassem Mohamed Bu Ataba Al-Zaabi
Board Positions:
Vice Chairman, e&
Chairman, Modon Holding PJSC
Vice Chairman, Abu Dhabi Holding Company (ADQ) (sovereign wealth fund)
Board member, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) (sovereign wealth fund)
Board member, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)
Board member, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB)
Governmental:
Secretary General, Artificial Intelligence & Advanced Technology Council
Board member, Tawazun Economic Council (the defense and security acquisitions authority for the UAE Armed Forces and Abu Dhabi Police)
Chairman of the Department of Finance
Chairman, Abu Dhabi Pension Fund
Vice Chairman, UAE Central Bank
Saif Saeed Ghobash
Board Positions:
Board Member, Mubadala Investment Company (sovereign fund)
Governmental:
Secretary General, the Abu Dhabi Executive Council
Under-Secretary, the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi
Rima Al Mokarrab Al Muhairi (aka the designated quasi-NGO/think tank person)
NGO:
President, Ideas Abu Dhabi (partnership with a US-based NGO Aspen Institute)
Governmental:
Executive Director, the Executive Affairs Authority of Abu Dhabi (advisor to the President of UAE)
Board Positions:
Chair, Tamkeen LLC
Board of Trustees, NYU
Board Member, the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research (think a think tank)
Vice Chair, Zayed University
Professor Daniela Rus (aka “the academic”)
Director, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT
Dr. Lisa Su (aka “The Semiconductor Giant”)
Corporate Positions:
CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Peng Xiao
Corporate Positions:
CEO, G42
Board Positions:
Board Member, MGX
Martin Edelman (aka “the lawyer”)
Corporate Positions:
Senior of Counsel, Paul Hastings
Partner, Fisher Brothers
Advisor, Mubadala Investment Company
Board Positions:
Board Member, MGX
Board Member, Lionheart Strategic Management
Professor Eric Xing (aka “the Academic” + face of the university)
Corporate Positions:
CEO and Founder, Petuum Inc.
What about MBZUAI’s students?
MBZUAI offers students free tuition and covers their living stipend. So who’s coming?
So far, it seems the only ones to jump on the bandwagon are US-educated Chinese students: the university’s current student body is about 30% mainland Chinese, according to an admissions officer based in China (private conversation with me). MBZUAI advertises to prospective students funding opportunities for ambitious research projects as well as work opportunities post-graduation: “80% of graduates decided to stay in the UAE, working for companies like ADNOC (UAE national oil company), G42 AIQ (subsidiary of G42) and TII (AI research institute).”
MBZUAI aims to be Abu Dhabi’s Stanford. Before you send in your application, however, it’s probably worth contemplating the following:
Look to NYU Abu Dhabi as an example of an Emirati-led institution, and you might want to reconsider studying there if you value academic freedom at all;
Stay on the lookout for MGX’s next moves on Stargate: Sam Altman is making the rounds to drum up more funding for the $500 billion project, stamping out any skepticism from Elon Musk on the way. And keep an eye out for the conferences that will take place in the AI and technology UAE from October to December — who will be attending and, more importantly, who will be sponsoring.
Zilan Qian is a program associate (research) at the Oxford China Policy Lab and holds a Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford.
Trigger warning: the second half of this article explores suicide.
“The US-China AI race is a race between Chinese — those in the US vs. those in China.”
This joke has real-world references. It is no secret that Chinese engineers and researchers make up a meaningful percentage of the AI workforce in the US. According to the Paulson Institute’s Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0, by 2022, US institutions relied more on Chinese AI researchers (38%) compared to US AI researchers (37%). Yet, this tracker still underestimates the Chinese AI talents in the US, because researchers are only counted as Chinese if their undergraduate degree is from a Chinese institution. That excludes a massive number of China-born AI researchers who did their undergraduate degrees in the US.
Meanwhile, China’s own AI progress, almost 100% powered by China-born Chinese, has grown at an unmatched pace. Besides the industry performance that can compete with the US, in 2024, China’s AI research publication output matched the combined output of the US, UK, and European Union, and now commands more than 40% of global citation attention.
People often cite China’s talent pipeline as one of its most valuable strategic resources — a system to admire or even emulate. Unfortunately, this view is fundamentally wrong. The system is highly inefficient, with a low cost-return rate: the top STEM genius everyone sees at the summit is built upon the bodies of massive numbers of talented students who failed to reach the top.
This piece is not about the life stories of successful Chinese AI or STEM talents. It is not about how the talent system works — but about how it does not. It explores the price paid to create this talent pool and the untold mental health stories behind it, as experienced and witnessed by me.
How to Build an “AI Talent Pipeline”
I grew up in Hangzhou, which is known today as one of China’s booming AI and robotics hubs. I went to some of the city’s top middle and high schools, the kinds of places that sit at the center of the country’s STEM pipeline. A middle school senior several years ahead of me became the co-founder of xAI, and another high school senior cofounded Pika AI.
My high school reliably produces at least one International Olympiad gold medalist in STEM subjects every two years, and a recent student just outperformed OpenAI in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). All except one of my high school classmates majored in STEM, and about half of them went on to Zhejiang University (ZJU) — the alma mater of DeepSeek’s CEO. A handful of my friends are doing PhDs in CS, EE, or ML at leading Chinese and Ivy League-level overseas universities, some supervised by professors listed on Times AI 100.
IOI leatherboard showing three Chinese high school students overperforming OpenAI, one of them being a student from my high school.
On paper, this is the kind of pipeline many places dream of building. In practice, living inside it felt far less enviable.
In elementary school, most parents enrolled their kids in Olympic math training. Some of my peers juggled six different math tutoring classes a week. Later, these math programs began to lose popularity, replaced by coding, Python, and machine learning courses. By the time I entered middle school, coding had become a standard path.
The after-school care activities provided by a mid-tier elementary school in Hangzhou in September 2025, which includes “LLM application”, “military model making”, “augmented reality (AR) coding”, “Visual algorithm programming (pure logic), “Creative Robotics,” and, perhaps most ordinary yet strangely out of place in this lineup, “creative children’s painting.”
Before the first day of middle school, the school coding team held a 2-hour math exam to recruit new members. Out of 650 students in my cohort, more than 100 were selected for the first round. Over the next two years, that number shrank to about 15. At first, we trained for half a day a week, later a full day. This came on top of 7 am-to-5 pm schooldays (which would eventually stretch to 7 am-to-9 pm, 5.5 days a week) and weekends packed with supplemental classes.
The reward was clear: perform well in provincial programming competitions and you could secure a spot in a top high school. The risk was equally clear: most students could not balance this with preparing for the high school entrance exam, and eventually lost both the opportunity to enter a top high school through programming competitions and the regular path through the high school entrance exam (高中招生考试, which is usually known as 中考). In my city, 95,000 students sat for that test each year, and my high school (the top 1 in the city) recruited less than 300 through exams (and another 300 through other means).1
High school further raised the stakes. Prestigious schools ran Olympiad teams in math, informatics, chemistry, physics, and biology. At my school, at least 400 students entered these training streams, but fewer than 30 students in total might reach the national stage representing the province. There, fewer than 5 in total get selected into the national team and advance to international competitions. At the peak of the system, winners of international and occasionally national competitions were guaranteed admission to Peking or Tsinghua University, while reaching the national stage may get certain admission priority compared to others in the Gaokao. In 2022, the admission rate of Peking and Tsinghua combined in Zhejiang Province was 0.16%.
The training often began with one day per week and escalated to full weeks or even months devoted entirely to Olympiad preparation. Meanwhile, boarding school meant a 6 am-to-10 pm schedule, with Sundays spent back at school by noon and weekends set aside for extra classes. For those who fell behind, catching up to peers who had been preparing for the Gaokao full-time was almost impossible. The later you were eliminated from the Olympiad track, the more closing the gap and getting into a good university via the Gaokao became a hopeless endeavor.
If you do make it past the Gaokao, the grind continues in university. A friend at Zhejiang University once told me that during exam months, she slept only three hours a night. In her dorm, six students rotated sleep so that someone was always awake to wake up the others after their allotted three hours.
In 2020, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications changed its trash bins from the right to the left, because the old version had a curved top, and students complained that it was hard to put computers on top and do programming wherever they needed. The new version has a flat top to enable students to program on it.
If one is to continue in academia in China, metrics for academic publications create mounting pressure. To obtain a CS-related PhD from Zhejiang University, students are required to publish at least two articles in SCI as the first author, and at least one needs to be in a CAS Zone 2 journal (at least the top 15% of the respective discipline). Other universities have similar publication requirements. And for those who stay in academia, the pressure only intensifies! China’s 非升即走 (“up or out”) tenure system sets strict timelines for publications and funding, with no second chances for those who fall short.2
Across all these stages, the structure looks less like a ladder of opportunity than a staircase with a trap door at every step. Each milestone comes with an award for the top STEM students–admissions priority — but also punishes those who fail.
A recent screenshot of a PowerPoint circulated on Chinese social media about the requirements made by a PhD advisor to their students (sources not verified). According to the PowerPoint, the advisor requires 11 hours of work daily, from 8:30 to 22:30, with six fingerprint check-ins and security camera monitoring. Students must propose their own research topics, write their own reports, and present in English during group meetings. They are also expected to write their papers independently, only during vacations, with two papers reaching an impact factor greater than 10, a threshold that is exceptionally challenging to achieve given that only around 2% of the academic journals have an impact factor greater than 10. Absences must be made up, and severe punishment will be administered if employees are found playing video games or watching DVDs.
And there is no cushion for failure. If you fail to get into a good middle school because you split your time between coding camp and the high school entrance exam, you have very little chance of getting into a good university. The scarcity of resources means that at a mediocre high school (meanwhile, around 50% of middle schoolers do not even get into academic high schools), you would have no chance of getting good STEM coaches and support to continue exploring your talents in high school.
The other door to good universities — taking the Gaokao — is also closed to most, if you cannot get into good high schools. The best two high schools in my city each sent more than 140 students to the best university in my province (Zhejiang University) in 2024 (and more than 40 each to Peking and Tsinghua Universities). The 10th high school (which is still considered good in academic performance) sent 19 students, whereas most schools ranking below that had single-digit or no admissions.
Meanwhile, an average university does not offer great resources for its STEM students. The 2021 Nature study shows that a Chinese STEM student’s university experience is a high-stakes filter. While only students in elite institutions achieved significant growth in critical thinking and academic skills over four years, the average STEM student at a non-elite university saw virtually no skill gains and often experienced a decline. This stagnation is particularly notable because these average Chinese students begin university with skills significantly surpassing those of even top students in peer countries like India and Russia. Their considerable initial talent is thus arguably wasted because the Chinese system reserves the resources necessary for continued skill development exclusively for the small cohort admitted to the most selective, “elite” institutions.
This is a system of ruthless natural selection: only the brightest continue, and the rest are quietly discarded.
The Human Cost of Building the STEM Talent Pipeline
Trigger warning starts here…
In the autumn of 2018, I was waiting at a psychiatry clinic to address my burnout problem after preparing for the Gaokao and the SAT at the same time. Suddenly, the machine voice called out a familiar name: a high school classmate from the Olympiad team. Teachers had described him as a future national champion, someone destined for Peking or Tsinghua and top national science labs. We saw each other in the waiting room but did not speak. The silence was an agreement to pretend we did not know each other.
Mental health was rarely spoken of openly, but the signs were widely available. I knew many classmates whose middle or high school experiences left visible or hidden scars. One had long marks on her arm from self-harm. Another took a gap year halfway through high school. A few transferred to middle/high schools abroad. Three more took gap years later, during their university studies overseas.
All of them were once the students that teachers and parents placed the highest hopes on — top of the class, members of math or informatics Olympiad teams. Yet few became the “talent” they were trained to be. Many ended up in very good places — Oxbridge, the China Academy of Art, consulting, or finance — but not in the elite Chinese labs or international research institutes that had once seemed their destiny. These alternative paths offered equally sustainable futures, often at a lower personal cost, particularly for those with the economic or social resources to pursue them. But they were not outcomes you could announce proudly among peers. Foreign degrees, artistic pursuits, and wealth were desirable — but they were secondary to being regarded as exceptionally gifted in STEM and proving yourself through your own intellect, specifically inside the traditional ivory tower.
However, not everyone is lucky enough to find a path and make it through. During the 2020 Gaokao year, with Covid-19 disruptions compounding the stress, there were at least three high school students rumored to have committed suicide in the city. None were publicly acknowledged. Local schools, authorities, and media downplayed the incidents.
When I returned for a middle school reunion last year, one teacher told me there are now “one or two cases [of students committing suicide] every semester” in the city. My friend, who is beginning a PhD in CS at the best provincial university, said his department had two student suicides in 2024.
Even public data confirms the trend. A 2023 study published in the China CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) Weekly 中国疾病预防控制中心周报 reported that while overall suicide rates in China have declined, the rate among children and adolescents has risen. Between 2010 and 2021, suicide deaths among urban and rural children aged 5-14 substantially increased, as did deaths among 15-24 year-olds from 2017 to 2021, surpassing three per 100,000.
Graphs of age-specific suicide mortality by geographic location in China, 2010–2021 included in the study. (A) Suicide mortality in children aged 5-14 years old by location. (B) Suicide mortality in adults aged 15-24 years old by location. (C) 25-44 years old. (D) 45-64 years old. (E) 65 years or older.
However, the pressure is not limited to students. Young academics, especially those working in STEM, also struggle with mounting research pressures. A 2025 study compiled 130 verified suicide cases in China’s academic and scientific circles from the 1990s to 2024. It found that work and academic pressure were the leading factors, cited in 53 percent of cases. More than half of those who died worked in science and engineering fields. The most affected age group was 20-29, accounting for 53 percent of cases. And the numbers are rising: 38 cases were recorded from 2000 to 2009, 52 from 2010 to 2019, and already 38 between 2020 and 2024.
Graph compiled by a WeChat account based on the research, showing that science and engineering account for 56.15% of total suicides, humanities and social science for 28.46% and medicine for 10.77%.
How to Hide the Cost
The figures above almost certainly underestimate the problem. They capture only the cases that slip through layers of silence. Suicide in China’s education and research system is managed through a multilayered regime of suppression.
At the first level, teachers (for student suicides) and school administrators downplay or conceal incidents. Their incentive is straightforward: avoid public criticism and protect their own careers. Local governments then step in to prevent negative publicity, leaning on media outlets and social platforms to delete or bury reports. If those measures fail, the central government becomes involved, concerned primarily with preserving social stability.
To be fair, investigations can be carried out at each stage. Teachers and schools usually notify local police; the education bureau may research the cause of suicide, and the central state would also mandate a more thorough investigation. There are many cases where public attention was enough to push for good investigations and the central state’s public acknowledgement. But many more cases do not survive until that stage, and investigations often leave room for more speculation.
For example, when a 17-year-old boy suddenly fell to his death in his high school in 2021, school administrators swiftly seized his body and drove to the funeral parlor, while notifying his mother only two hours later and banning her from entering the campus. Meanwhile, local police aggressively censored posts on social media and blamed the death on a “personal issue.” Although public dissent was large enough to force a central authority-mandated re-investigation, local police again ruled out foul play and claimed the family had “no objection.”
Some students make dark jokes that the only way to guarantee graduate school admission (保研) is if your roommate suffers something life-threatening. In cases of rape or suicide, some universities quietly offer guaranteed admission to those who report the incident, so the case doesn’t become public. The humor is bitter, but the logic is rooted in lived experience where tragedy is normalized, even instrumentalized, in a system that prefers silence to awareness and change.
Screenshot of a Zhihu discussion thread regarding providing guaranteed graduate school admission to the roommate of a student who committed suicide. The top answer, with 34k likes, said: “When the incident happened, you thought the school would say: ‘Please don’t spread the news, we will offer you guaranteed admission.’ What the school actually did was: ‘Strictly ban posting anything on Zhihu, Weibo, or Tieba (popular Chinese social media platforms); if found, students will be expelled from the school,’ while making a lot of effort to tune down public dissent by giving money to Weibo to ask them to remove/censor people’s posts.”
This censorship compounds the stigma already surrounding mental health. Seeking help is seen as wasting precious study time. Shame still lingers around mental health despite some recent improvements in awareness.
The Collective “Dream”
What do I see as the secret of China’s AI talent? A “human sea attack 人海战术”: massive scale creates fierce competition that elevates top performers, while accepting enormous attrition as the system’s operating cost. Enough talented students enter the pipeline that losing most along the way still produces exceptional outliers at the top.
But scale and attrition alone don’t fully explain the system’s output. There was also an ideological component. After I left China to study abroad, I met many students from Oxbridge and the Ivy League. Many are very smart, but probably few of them could compete with my Chinese classmates within the Chinese system. The elite students in the UK and the US were brighter in another way — passionate and determined as individuals.
Meanwhile, we had been taught to be passionate and determined as a collective.
“Though hardships endure, never cease striving forward, with utmost loyalty in service to the nation; 忧患其久 不辍奋进 精忠报国. Only seeking great achievement, to pass on the torch, for future generations to rely upon. 唯求大成 薪火相继 后学所凭.”
These lines come from my high school’s school song. Back then, studying STEM carried an implicit patriotic mandate — the ideal was to become a pure scholar advancing the nation through knowledge. This was the greatness we were all supposed to be pursuing, the torch in our hands, and the shared future into which we were meant to channel our passion.
Of course, this patriotic mandate is different from the one China had decades ago. The years of pure scientism and old scientific nationalism in China have faded. Many students now consider practicality over ideology, choosing economics or finance over foundational sciences, to the extent that the state started to censor such narratives as negative emotions. Mental health awareness has grown. Overwork is no longer universally celebrated as dedication to the nation.
Yet the embedded ideology of techno-nationalism, or — in the parlance of modern propaganda — “science and education for the development of the nation” (科教兴国), remains powerfulfor individuals, especially when geopolitical pressures reinforce it. Regardless of whether ordinary Chinese think they are racing with the US, many of us have been trained to race, especially in STEM, from the very beginning of our lives.
The core question about China’s talent system is not whether China can continue producing top AI talent through this system. It can, at least until its population shrinks drastically. It is not whether other countries can have as many native talents as China has — they can, if they have enough people to lose. The question is whether we have paid enough for this race, and whether the next generation will be willing to pay more — both racing internally against each other, and externally against other countries.
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The high school’s alternative recruitment drive brought in 300 additional students via two main channels: test-waived admissions (保送名额) for the top 1-10 students in feeder middle schools, and separate provincial exams (省招) to secure top STEM talent from high schools in neighboring counties.
Historically, Chinese academics enjoyed more permanent “iron-rice bowl” 铁饭碗 style employment without these formal up-or-out reviews. However, many Chinese universities now operate a fixed-term “tenure-track” system: junior faculty (assistant professors or post-docs) are given roughly six years to meet strict criteria—mostly around publications and grants—and then either receive a permanent (tenured) appointment or leave the institution.
The system resembles the US tenure track, where junior faculty undergo a six- to seven-year review. However, in the US, meeting the evaluation criteria is generally sufficient to secure tenure. Except in a handful of elite institutions, faculty in American academia are unlikely to be denied tenure at the end of their review periods, and elite-school tenure-track scholars generally have flexibility to move to other institutions. Whereas in China, simply fulfilling the metrics set by the university is often not enough. Candidates frequently need to exceed expectations by a significant margin, which has led some to describe the process as a tournament, with multiple rounds of competition to secure a position. Others characterize China’s tenure system as a “bet-on agreement” (对赌协议) between the individual and the university: if the researcher succeeds, they gain tenure and its associated benefits; if they fail, they may lose their position entirely and, in some cases, be required to repay relocation or housing subsidies.
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