Despite the changing relationship between Washington and Beijing over the decades, the US defence industry has seen marked contributions from experts of Chinese heritage since at least the dawn of the nuclear age.
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But rising competition between the two powers, along with a general anti-China sentiment in research and development, has narrowed the path into the US defence industry for Chinese-origin scientists in recent years.
A look through the awards lists for the Asian-American Engineer of the Year (AAEOY), an annual prize hosted by the Chinese Institute of Engineers USA, shows a rapid decline in the numbers of winners working in defence.
From the AAEOY’s inception in 2002, its winners were largely drawn from laboratories funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE), such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and defence contractors Lockheed Martin, Raytheon or Boeing.
More recently, most of the ethnically Chinese winners have come from commercial aerospace, telecommunications, or car and electronics manufacturing, while those affiliated with Los Alamos and Lockheed Martin have all but disappeared.
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This sharp drop has coincided with China’s rapid transformation in military power – from hypersonic missiles to sixth-generation fighters – that is steadily shrinking the gap between the two countries.
The change in the defence industry could be a legacy of the China Initiative, which targeted scientists on national security grounds over suspected links to Beijing during President Donald Trump’s first term.