According to South Korea's "Central Daily News", a hot topic discussed among South Korean science and engineering scholars recently is "invitation from China." Among them, many professors in electrical and electronics, materials, design and other majors, especially those with semiconductor-related patents, have received invitations from Chinese universities.
The report pointed out that Li Yongxi, a carbon nanotube (CNT) expert who was the head of the Nanostructure Physics Research Group of the Institute of Basic Sciences (IBS) in South Korea and a visiting professor at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea who specializes in next-generation semiconductor and battery technology, has been hired by China's Hubei University of Technology and is currently teaching at the school's Institute of Semiconductors and Quantum.
Another Korean expert poached by China is Li Qiming, a Korean theoretical physicist and former vice president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIST). After his retirement in 2024, he was hired by the Yanqi Lake Institute of Applied Mathematics (BIMSA) in Beijing, China, to teach.
The report mentioned that Lee Yong-hee and Lee Qiming were selected as "National Scholars" by the South Korean government in 2005 and 2006 respectively. They have high status in the field of basic scientific research. However, after retirement, both of them failed to find suitable positions in South Korea, so they chose to develop in China. In contrast, universities and colleges in various provinces in China are actively poaching the world's top science and engineering scholars to accelerate China's national strategy of "powerful through R&D."
Since 2012, Professor Li Yongxi has served as the leader of the IBS Nanostructure Physics Research Group in South Korea, leading the team to achieve many research results in the fields of carbon nanotubes, graphene, water splitting catalysts, and two-dimensional structure semiconductors. Since 2018, Li Yongxi has been consistently ranked among the top 1% of top scholars in the world whose papers are most frequently cited.
According to reports, after Hubei University of Technology hired Li Yongxi, it immediately established the "Low Dimensional Quantum Materials (LQM) Research Institute" and recruited researchers on a large scale with "a team of the world's top scholar Professor Li Yongxi, advanced research equipment, an annual salary of 260,000 yuan, and additional housing and entrepreneurial funds." Research projects include two-dimensional semiconductors and solar cells.
A professor at an engineering university in Seoul said that Chinese universities' poaching programs are "just like travel agency packages." If the invitee "brings the entire laboratory there," the application conditions can be better, which surprised him. Because he was still implementing South Korea's national project plan, he did not continue to talk with the Chinese side. "But the research environment they provided was very attractive, which made me interested."
The report mentioned that China’s research and development in related fields has posed a threat to South Korea’s storage technology. According to people in Korean industry and academia, China's Yangtze Memory was the first to apply hybrid bonding technology to mass production in the chip industry, and it has a large number of PhD-level employees, so its research and development speed is very alarming.