I read today article by Howard W. French, (translated into Portuguese) that must have been in the New York Times a few days ago, so my translation back of parts into English is not exact and to save typing, I am also condensing the facts and ideas:
1) 58 year old Princeton U. prof (Andrew Yao), world leader in computer sciences, & Yale genetist Xu Tian, and nuclear physicist Yan Fujia are among the dozens highest level professors that China has already bought home to well equipped new labs in a "billions of dollars" plan to make 30 mainland universities "superior to Harvard." Money is no objective /problem thanks to the great trade surplus. Because of the low general wage levels etc the cost of the new buildings is less than US $50/ square foot.
2) Already each year China graduates in engineering alone: 442,000 new engineers, plus 48,000 with masters degrees, plus 8,000 Ph.D.s Since 1998, when Jiang Zemin began to transform higher education in China, it has been transformed. In 2004 alone, US$10.4 billion was spent on improving the graduate schools and "buying professors" from the world's best universities. Ex MIT's mathematician, Tian Gang is heading up a new advance math research center that will soon exceed western-trained "brain power" at Princeton’s Center for Advanced Studies, where Einstein et al worked.
Living outside of US, in a city with great news papers (They ought to be as they copy from all the world's best and have staff on site around the world.) one is not as "thought controlled" as in the US. Thus three year ago I became aware that western world has already lost engineering leadership to Asia and is in the process of losing scientific leadership during this generation as well. That is why I wrote Dark Visitor - more details soon at web site under my name. (Currently site is down but in a few days should be back up.)