> [..] any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.

-- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature"

This is just as true for scientists. Bought, caged, too addicted to harmony with peers -- all these and more have the same result.

If you cannot even say that the Tiananmen Square massacre happened, if there is an arbitrary set of facts you are even allowed to acknowledge, determined basically by brownshirts through violence, you may be doing something, but you're not being a fully fledged scientists anymore than an elephant could be found in a small fridge. I don't even need to look at the person, the circumstances are fully sufficient for this determination.

Which is kind of insane to think about. I don’t know them too well otherwise I’d ask them of their reasons for moving permanently out of China.

Just that I have a sample size of 1, so take it with a grain of salt.