Dr Erinne Stirling, Zhejiang University

I write this piece from my 28th floor apartment during the rainy days of Spring Festival, as an Australian postdoctoral fellow living and working in China. This is a position which I started one day before the first known case of the then Huanan Seafood Market pneumonia outbreak. A position from which I have watched Australian politics time and time again act in frankly baffling ways.

But this is a story about the ECR careers of ESA, and this story starts, oddly enough, at my ex-boyfriend’s engagement party in January 2019. Turns out we have no mutual friends and so I was chatting online instead of standing around awkwardly. I was chatting to a friend who was currently doing a postdoc at Zhejiang University in soil ecology. A friend who name dropped me and the fact that I wanted a Chinese fellowship to their group leader.

A position that I was granted later that night after some back-and-forth emails.

I’d say that this is a strange way to get a job, but every single science job I’ve had in my life has happened in a similar way.

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When it comes to working in here, landing the position seems to be the easy part. Jumping through the bureaucratic hoops to work and live here though – that is a whole ‘nother thing entirely. I absolutely would not have been able to sort out the paperwork on my own – and even now, in year three, I still cannot navigate the government systems without significant help. To give an example: I officially started at the University in December 2019 – and (because of banking regulations for foreigners, Spring Festival public holidays, and the at-the-time epidemic) did not receive my first paycheque until March 2020.

The project had a shaky start. As it stood, I had very little time to get anything properly done before the country broke for Spring Festival – and then while I was visiting another province for a few weeks during the festival the epidemic happened proper. Bullet trains were being cancelled all over the country and I made it back to Hangzhou just before the entire national transit system ground to a halt.

Now, Hangzhou is a bit of a dormitory city – full of young professionals who travelled home for Spring Festival. And it was effectively abandoned when I returned. No one in the streets – like a post-apocalyptic world where the building rot hasn’t settled in yet. There were (brief) food shortages and (not so brief) lock ins. Permission slips to leave and enter your apartment complex (every other day). In my complex, the fire escapes were bolted and the rooftop garden doors were barricaded. Security guards controlled anyone who left or entered the building.

And so… I worked.

Not like there was anything else to do. None of my hobby goods had arrived from Australia. I couldn’t go anywhere and anyway – I had no Chinese money. I took to climbing up and down the fire escape (34 floors) and sunning myself at the corridor window in an attempt to get some natural light. People I knew in Australia were a bit concerned, yes, but what we were living was so far out of their experience that it was difficult to really explain.

And I worked. Not effectively, to be fair, but still.

I worked, and there was never ever a hint that the university would fire anyone. There was no talk of voluntary redundancies. There were no projects disbanded. There was no hiring freeze. In fact, I submitted my largest successful grant during that period – the submissions systems were specifically streamlined to ensure no one was disadvantaged.

And eventually, we went back to the office, to the lab, to the greenhouses. We wanted to go back, and we did. The students eventually came back to campus. And then… everything was 99% normal (except for continuing travel restrictions) and has been running at basically normal since May-ish 2020.

I’ve been published throughout the past few years and I’m in a good position to progress.

I wanted a Chinese postdoctoral fellowship after my PhD because I looked at the state of science funding in Australia and knew that there would be no job for me there. The whittling away of government support, the ‘efficiency dividends’, the stagnation of research and development funds. It seemed at the time that Australian science research in general and ecology in particular is funded on the back of hundreds of PhDs – a highly skilled job that pays young people less than what they’d get for the equivalent time in a fast-food kitchen.

And, while I’ve missed out on a hefty chunk of networking opportunities, of mentorship, of training – I can’t help but think that I got it easy compared to the ECRs working and living in Australia these past two years.

And I don’t know if I could ethically encourage a recent graduate to carry on at university given the current environment, but for me, at least, it’s time to go home.

Images: (Top) The road outside of Zhejiang Univeristy’s Zijingang campus during lockdown, February 2020. This road is typically bumper to bumper with traffic during normal times, Credit: Erinne Stirling; (Bottom) Return to work, May 2020. These rice plants were used to study circadian rhythms in rhizobial microbes and soil viruses. Credit: Erinne Stirling.