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China Wants Foreign Scientists. The Public Says No, Thanks.
Since Beijing announced a new visa to attract young science and technology graduates, a backlash has erupted online, forcing the government to respond.
Students at Peking University in Beijing in May. As new college graduates in China have struggled to find jobs, an uproar has developed over the government’s moves to attract science and tech grads from abroad.Credit...Andrea Verdelli for The New York Times
By Vivian Wang
Reporting from Beijing
Oct. 14, 2025Updated 9:27 p.m. ET
When the Chinese government announced a new visa to attract young science and technology talent, it advertised the move as another step toward becoming the leading scientific power, one to which people from around the globe would flock.
To many in China, it was a gross mistake.
In the days before and since Oct. 1, when the visa was supposed to come into effect, commenters have accused the government of inviting foreigners to steal jobs from Chinese people, at a time when young people are finding it harder than ever to land work. They have suggested that foreigners are being blindly worshiped, a longstanding national sore point.
Prominent influencers have also stoked nationalism or xenophobia, claiming that China will be overrun by outsiders. After Henry Huiyao Wang, the president of the Center for China and Globalization, a research group in Beijing, praised the new visa, people on social media called him a race traitor, and their posts were shared thousands of times.
Platforms have been especially flooded by racist comments about Indians, after Indian news outlets reported on the Chinese visa as a possible alternative to the highly popular H-1B visa in the United States, which now comes with a $100,000 fee.
Henry Huiyao Wang, the head of a Beijing research group, was called a race traitor after expressing support for a Chinese visa aimed at foreigners in STEM industries.Credit...Luo Yunfei/China News Service/VCG, via Getty Images
The backlash grew so fierce that the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, People’s Daily, published an editorial calling criticisms of the visa “outlandish” and accusing opponents of misleading the public. Hu Xijin, the former editor in chief of Global Times, a nationalist tabloid, defended the policy, saying in a video that he saw fewer foreigners in China than in Japan or South Korea.
“To be honest, it’s not that there are too many foreigners coming to China right now,” he said, “but rather that there aren’t enough.”
The public outcry suggests that China may still struggle to attract the world’s best and brightest scientists, even as the United States has cut research funding and pushed many prominent scholars to consider leaving.
Anti-foreign sentiment has grown in China in recent years, as the government has warned of hostile overseas powers and urged people to report potential spies. China has historically had minuscule levels of inbound immigration, and many cultural and legal barriers remain for foreigners seeking to remain long-term.
When the government proposed slightly loosening permanent residency requirements for foreigners in 2020, it eventually retreated in the face of a similar backlash. (China granted fewer than 5,000 permanent residency cards between 2004 and 2014, according to People’s Daily.)
Even in defending the policy, the People’s Daily editorial assured readers that the visa would make it easier for young scientists to come to China, but that it “cannot be equated with immigration.”
It is unclear whether the visa would even grant the right to work, as opposed to simply allowing people to conduct business and educational “exchanges,” as state media said after the visa was announced. Eligibility details have not yet been released, even though the launch date has passed. Officials have said only that applicants would need to have obtained a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, math or engineering from a top university.
The difficult job market for young people has been a potential flashpoint for years, as China grapples with slowing growth. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has said that ensuring employment is key to preventing social unrest. The latest jobs figures, released in August, show youth unemployment at a new high.
“Among people from every walk of life, educational background and age group I’ve met, everyone says: Work is hard to find,” a popular manga author who uses the pen name Feng Xi Shen Lei wrote on social media. “Given the talent pool in China, I don’t believe that there’s any position in any field that must be filled by a foreigner.”
Commenters also attacked the requirement that applicants need only a bachelor’s degree. Many young Chinese say that they need advanced degrees to find jobs, because of stiff competition.
In reality, foreigners who enter on K visas may not directly be competing with most of the unemployed young Chinese.
That is in part because of a mismatch between supply and demand in China’s job market. Many recent graduates are struggling to find jobs because the sectors that have historically employed most of them, such as real estate or education, are suffering. But in fields such as advanced manufacturing or artificial intelligence, China needs tens of millions more qualified candidates than it has, according to the Ministry of Education.
Though China produces the most science and technology graduates in the world by numbers, those graduates make up a smaller proportion of the total work force than in many Western countries.
Denis Simon, the former executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University and an advocate for more scientific cooperation between the United States and China, said that greater transparency about how the visas will be granted could help ease people’s concerns. But he said Beijing was sending a clear signal that it wanted to bring in more foreign expertise.
“This is part of the longer-term reforms needed to attract high-end talent,” he said.
