China's Universities Are Wooing Western Scientists

And they are reaching beyond academics with Chinese heritage.

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Dr. Charles Lieber had few options. On April 28, the renowned former Harvard chemist took up a new post at Tsinghua University's Shenzhen campus. Dr. Lieber had been looking for a perch after he was convicted in America in 2021 for hiding ties to Chinese research funding. He is one of a handful of senior Western scholars who have recently taken up posts in China. Others have done so more from a position of choice.

The websites of Peking University and Tsinghua University, respectively, recently confirmed that Dr. Gerard Mourou, a French Nobel prize-winning physicist, and Dr. Kenji Fukaya, a decorated Japanese mathematician, were joining their faculties.

This month, Dr. Alex Lamb, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, confirmed he was leaving a lab at Microsoft in New York for Tsinghua's new AI college. "I think that Tsinghua is a very good university," Dr. Lamb wrote in an e-mail. "The quality of the undergraduate students is extremely strong and Tsinghua's ability to recruit strong graduate students is rapidly improving."