Asian Scientists on the Move: Changing Science in a Changing Asia

Abstract

The imaginary of an ascendant Asia as a scientific and technological powerhouse has loomed large in public and policy debates in the United States and Europe in recent years. Increasingly, universities and research institutes in Asia are seen as competitors and innovators that have the potential to disrupt established hierarchies in the global scientific field. In Anju Mary Paul’s Asian Scientists on the Move: Changing Science in a Changing Asia, we see the transnational social lives of the scientists behind these developments and come to understand the complex decisions that shape their scientific careers and migratory decisions. Paul shows the linkages between national systems and cultures of science and the global scientific field, and identifies the agency of individual actors in raising the national profiles of their “home” and “host” countries in global science. Paul brings her much-needed expertise in international migration and her skill as a rigorous empirical social scientist to the study of Asian scientists. At the core of Paul’s data are interviews with 119 life sciences academic scientists who received their PhDs or postdoctoral training at elite universities overseas (e.g. Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and were employed at elite universities in their home or host country (e.g. Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Academia Sinica, Indian Institute of Science). While some scientists “returned” to their country of birth, others in Paul’s interview sample were “halfway-returnees” who turned to places like Singapore and Taiwan, which allowed them to be closer to family but enabled them to maintain the scientific networks cultivated while they were overseas. The book is divided into three sections. In Part I, Paul provides an overview of the recent history of science policy in the four cases she examines: Mainland China,