AI expert Guo-Jun Qi leaves US for China
Award-winning
artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur Guo-Jun Qi has joined Westlake University in Hangzhou after a decade-long career in the
United States
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The 43-year-old Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers fellow and distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery is now a full-time faculty member at Westlake's School of Engineering, where he leads the Machine Perception and Learning (MAPLE) Lab, according to a university social media post.
A former Microsoft researcher and chief AI
scientist at Huawei Research USA, Qi now heads a team of 20 researchers to explore AI and deep learning for image, video and virtual environment generation.
'I was drawn to the free-spirited atmosphere at Westlake University and wanted to come back and pursue something I truly wanted to do,' the Chinese-born expert said in an interview with the university.
Qi earned a bachelor's degree in automation from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2005. He later obtained two PhDs – one from USTC in 2009 and another from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2012.
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During his doctoral studies, Qi won several prestigious awards, including the
Microsoft Fellowship, IBM Fellowship and the award for best paper at the Association for Computing Machinery's International Conference on Multimedia – a leading event in the field.
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Asia Times
2 days ago
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Marco Rubio's and Miles Yu's war on Chinese students is misguided
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Yu urges that the United States should sharply restrict academic engagement with China, calling such cooperation a national security threat. His claim is sweeping: that China has 'outsourced' its academic system to exploit American openness, and that the US must respond by severing intellectual ties. Both Rubio and Yu are also ignoring the data: Chinese nationals make up the largest share of foreign students in STEM fields — computer science, engineering, math and the physical sciences. According to the National Science Foundation, more than 80% of Chinese PhD recipients in these fields stay and work in the US after graduation, contributing directly to American innovation, entrepreneurship, and research leadership. Many have founded startups, filed patents and worked in cutting-edge labs at US universities and tech companies. The idea that they are 'outsourcing' American prosperity to China is not only false — it's self-destructive. If these students are forced out, the US will not only lose a competitive advantage in global talent — it will damage its innovation ecosystem at its roots. Immigration-driven innovation has been one of the few consistent engines of American prosperity in a polarized and gridlocked political climate. Treating every foreign-born talent as a potential spy will only drive them into the arms of competitors. Moreover, this zero-sum framing misrepresents how education actually works. American universities are not ideological weaklings — they are spaces where critical thinking, civic inquiry and pluralistic values are cultivated. Chinese students are not arriving with monolithic loyalties — they are shaped by their experiences here, often becoming some of the most perceptive critics of authoritarianism and some of the strongest defenders of democratic ideals. Diaspora students and scholars, such as the founders of China Labor Watch and Human Rights in China, have often been at the forefront of documenting abuses, challenging both Chinese state narratives and the overreach of US suspicion. They are not security liabilities — they are civic actors. And yet, they are increasingly caught in the middle. Media outlets rush to publish stories about alleged espionage long before there's due process. Federal task forces pressure universities to cut off collaborations without context. On social media, platforms like X — once Twitter — amplify xenophobic paranoia while silencing legitimate voices. The result is a digital public sphere poisoned by fear and disinformation, where nuance disappears and policy becomes a blunt instrument of exclusion. In my research — China's Emerging Inter-network Society — I explore how diaspora communities and digital platforms are reshaping political consciousness. 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If America had treated him then the way he now proposes treating others, Miles Yu might still be teaching Maoist doctrine in Anhui, not advising presidents in Washington. If Miles Yu truly believed Chinese students couldn't be trusted, one wonders why he chose to stay and serve in the US government rather than return to China after pursuing his PhD degree. Doesn't his own life prove the power of American education to transform, inspire, and integrate? If we now assume every Chinese student is a CCP foot soldier, does that include him too? Or is he the exception who proves the value — not the danger — of keeping the door open? He chose to stay in the United States not because he was coerced but because the openness and meritocracy of American institutions resonated with him. If we now claim that every Chinese student is a sleeper agent for Beijing, then Yu's own journey becomes an inconvenient contradiction. Isn't he the evidence that America's democratic model can win hearts and minds? That contradiction isn't just ironic. It's emblematic of a dangerous drift in US national security thinking in which suspicion has replaced strategy and identity has replaced evidence. If the US blocks Chinese students while maintaining that it wants to 'compete' with China, Beijing will likely frame the move as hypocritical — claiming it reveals American insecurity rather than confidence in its democratic model. The retaliatory measures may not just hurt bilateral relations but also signal to other countries the risks of aligning too closely with US policy on China. Yu's central claim is that Chinese students and scholars serve as covert extensions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), sent not to learn but to spy, steal, and subvert. This argument has gained traction in parts of Washington, where fears of intellectual property theft and technological competition are real and justified. But let's be clear: there is a vast difference between targeted counterintelligence and collective suspicion. To reduce an entire population of students — numbering over 270,000 annually — to latent threats is both empirically unfounded and strategically foolish. Chinese students are not a monolith. Many come precisely because they seek an alternative to the CCP's control. Some become critics of the regime. Others stay, contribute to US innovation, or build bridges that serve American interests abroad. Treating them as presumed agents of espionage doesn't protect US security — it undercuts America's greatest soft power asset: its openness. We are now witnessing the consequences of this worldview hardening into law. In May 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, citing security risks, announced that his department would move to revoke or block Chinese student visas in 'sensitive' research fields outright, citing national security risks. The proposal would give broad authority to federal agencies to deny or cancel visas without due process, based not on individual conduct, but on nationality and field of study. This is not strategic caution — it's blanket exclusion. And it mirrors the logic of Yu's essay: that anyone Chinese by origin or association is inherently suspect. Such policies are dangerously close to the racialized fearmongering of the Chinese Exclusion Act era, now dressed in tech-sector clothing. They undermine US universities, punish innocent scholars, and hand the CCP a propaganda victory. If carried out, this policy won't stop espionage — it will cripple American research labs, isolate Chinese dissidents, and accelerate talent flight to competitor nations like Canada, the UK, and Australia. The Trump administration's aggressive stance on Chinese espionage is haunted by the very intelligence failures it now seeks to prevent. 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Ironically, by closing the door on Chinese students, Rubio and his allies may be doing more to weaken America's global leadership than to defend The U.S.-China contest is not just about chips, jets, and rare earths. It's about the future of global norms — openness versus control, pluralism versus authoritarianism. In this battle, academic freedom is not a vulnerability. It's a weapon. It is what makes the US different from — and stronger than — the system the CCP promotes. If we start mimicking Beijing's paranoia, walling off knowledge, and excluding people based on their passport, we risk becoming what we claim to oppose. Yu himself is living proof of that freedom's power. He came to the US seeking truth, found it in an open society and used it to shape national strategy. That's a success story, not a turn around now and advocate for closing the gates behind him is not only short-sighted — it's a betrayal of the very ideals that made his own story possible. 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