Opinion | From ‘science fiction’ to reality: charting an unexplored aspect of China’s rapid rise

Name: Why are more Chinese scientists leaving the US to return to China?
Uploaded: 2025-04-20T01:00:22.000Z
Duration: 8 min 30 s
Description: Why are more Chinese scientists leaving the US to return to China?

In its 3 years, the Post’s dedicated science team has reported on China’s frontier research, goals, innovators and technological leaps

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Why you can trust SCMP

The South China Morning Post’s science team reports on breakthroughs in China, how Beijing invests in research and how its advances fit into the story of China’s rise. Photo: Shutterstock

Chow Chung-yan

Published: 9:00am, 20 Apr 2025

Dear friends,

This month marks the third anniversary of our small but dynamic science reporting team. To celebrate, I’d like to share a story with you.

In 2014 – a year after Edward Snowden’s exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post – we published a follow-up. Our science reporter, Stephen Chen, wrote that China was developing a “hack-proof” quantum communication network that would revolutionise encryption. The story was met with scepticism. Few people knew what quantum communication was, and even fewer believed China could outpace the US, Europe, or Japan in this field.

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Why are more Chinese scientists leaving the US to return to China?

Some readers questioned if we were treating “science fiction” as news. One drily noted that Stephen had already predicted the advent of quantum communication years earlier – yet the so-called “quantum leap” remained “unobserved”.

By 2017, however, mainstream Western media had finally begun taking China’s quantum technology seriously. Today, no one dismisses it as fantasy.

Similarly, in 2014, Stephen reported that China would build thorium nuclear reactors by 2024. Critics called it “far-fetched”. Yet last year, we – along with others – reported Beijing’s completion of the world’s first thorium nuclear power station in the Gobi Desert. This time, there were no sneers.

The list goes on.

Three years ago, we pooled limited resources to establish this science team precisely because of stories like these. Science is a critical yet under-reported driver of China’s rise. The Western media often dismisses China as a copycat, while domestic coverage remains tightly controlled. This gap makes the Post’s independent reporting uniquely valuable.