US-China S&T exchange: A victim of politics?

When the first formal agreement on science and technology between the US and China was signed in 1979, it was US strategy at the time that a stable, modernizing China was good for China, the US, and the world. Up until 2015, this was the essence of US policy, and two agreements, one on science and technology and the other on education exchange became bedrock elements of the bilateral relationship. On January 31, 1979, the first formal cooperative agreement between China and the US was on Cooperation in Science and Technology. The “Understanding on the Exchange of Students and Scholars,” signed in October 1978, was added to the January 1979 normalization agreement between Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping and remains the governing framework for education exchanges between the US and China.

On August 27, 2024, the latest deadline for renewal of the science and technology pact was missed. Denis Simon, former executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu province, thinks non-renewal will have a calamitous effect. Although there have been hints that the two nations will ultimately make a deal, it will likely be delayed until after the US presidential election, the outcome of which will determine its fate.Here he discusses the implications with Edith Terry, editor of AmCham HK e-magazine.

From diplomatic recognition in 1979 to decoupling in science and technology

The ambiguity over the status of the US-China Science and Technology Agreement (STA) reflects 40 plus years of history and the recent souring of relations between China and the United States. In 1979, China was a poor, developing country. Few in the US imagined that China would become a rival or competitor. People were not listening to the Chinese leadership when they stated their intentions to close the prevailing technological gap between China and West.

Why did US sentiment towards China turn sour? If you would have asked me in the 1990s, what is the problem for China in the science and technology (S&T) area, I would have said not enough funding, not enough talent, and an inadequate research infrastructure. But if you ask me today, there’s more than enough money, more than enough talent, and clearly one of the best infrastructures in the world in terms of laboratory equipment, facilities, instrumentation. And, given the leadership’s strong emphasis on innovation, China is an attractive place to do advanced research these days.

I’m not going to say China’s beating the US or the US is beating China. It’s not that kind of race. We all have different needs, different applications, and different purposes for technology. But one thing that’s very clear, and China’s leaders will say this.

China missed the First Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century because they were caught up in the period of western imperialism and the western control of China. They missed the Second Industrial Revolution, the mass manufacturing revolution, because that was the period of the Japanese invasion and World War Two. They only caught the tail end of the Third Industrial Revolution, in electronics and Information Technology (IT). And they missed it because they were mired in the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, which was the period in which the electronics, micro-electronics, and the IT revolutions took hold.

Now, the world has entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the revolution of artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, life sciences and much more. For a variety of reasons, China cannot afford to miss this latest, high-speed industrial revolution.

In June this year, Xi Jinping gave a speech at the National Science and Technology Awards Conference and general assemblies for members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE). 

Xi said that as the next industrial transformation develops around the world, scientific research in our country needs to deepen itself, advance to the extreme, and break through the boundaries of human cognition. He’s quite serious about China moving quickly and moving in a concerted fashion. He emphasized the need to focus on “new quality, productive forces.” What he means by that is embodied in a five or six-point plan about how they’re going to assume a position of leadership, or shared leadership, at the top of this Fourth Industrial Revolution, and they don’t plan to miss it again.

If China fails in its efforts to capture a significant place in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it will forfeit its status as a key player in international affairs, and not just in science and technology affairs. China’s leaders understand that science and technology capability and strength is a vehicle for China to have influence on a global level, and that includes global governance and setting the rules, the norms and the standards for how science and technology affairs are conducted.

China emerges as a science and technology competitor

American leaders didn’t mind in the 1980s and 1990s that there was an unequal relationship. We didn’t have parity, we didn’t have symmetry, and we didn’t have any kind of equality in terms of S&T capabilities.  US-China relations were very hierarchical, but as we got closer to some kind of parity, the asymmetries of the past largely disappeared, and the hierarchy with China as a student and the US as a teacher began to melt away. And suddenly, China was seen as an emerging competitor. Even though many people thought the STA would not be renewed in 2018 under the Trump administration, it was renewed, but under the cover of darkness.

Compared to the past, there was no fanfare, there was no formal signing ceremony, and pretty much after 2018 there were few activities. There had been up to 40 different protocols signed for collaboration across everything from earthquake studies all the way up to cancer studies. At some point, there were 30 different working groups. Perhaps the most successful project was CERC, the US-China Clean Energy Research Centers, which were set up when John Holdren was director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Wan Gang was China’s Minister of Science and Technology. They believed that the model of CERC, which included a strong addendum about the handling of intellectual property, which was one of the reasons why it was successful, could be a model for collaboration in other areas.

Even though the STA was renewed, it became largely dormant because of the prevailing political tensions between Beijing and Washington. There were five or six project areas that continued forward. But for the most part, the notion of the STA as a bedrock element of the relationship shifted from a welcoming area for collaboration to a problem area.  When it came time to renew it in 2023, it faced opposition, and the path forward was anything but clear.

The STA should have been renewed on August 27 of last year. But the discussion had shifted from a simple renewal to a perception that the agreement needed to be redrafted, along with its core principles, and the core operational design. The existing STA had become obsolete.

The relationship has grown far, far beyond what anyone had ever imagined. And even if the agreement signed in the education sphere did envision some collaboration, in the early 1980s, China’s universities were not research oriented. They had followed the Soviet model, where research was carried out within separate research institutes. But as China got closer to the US, the idea of collaborating with and shaping their university development so they would be like the R1 comprehensive research universities in the US became attractive.* Accordingly, they began to emulate the US model as they shifted away from the Soviet model.

That made university-to-university collaboration an attractive area for both China and the US; both US and Chinese academics found great value in their collaboration. The proof of that is in the fact that China had become the number one collaborator country with the US in terms of the publication in tier one refereed journals in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The negotiations became further politicized at the six-month mark of the first renewal, when it was decided to have another extension. In March 2024, the STA was extended for another six months, which took us to August 27, 2024, but basically no announcement was made. There was supposed to be an announcement about the status of the STA after President Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan went to Beijing from August 27 to 29.  After reading the printout of his visit, however, STA was not an issue on the list of priorities.

In the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs under the State Department (OES) the Office of International S&T Cooperation is handling the day-to-day negotiations of this, along with, I’m sure, input from OSTP, though I sense the role of OSTP has become much more conservative than during the earlier years. The role of OSTP was always as a facilitator of S&T collaboration. You can use the word dormant, you can use the word diminished, whatever word you want to use, but the relationship right now has nothing of the stature and the scope that it had during the first 30 years or so of our collaboration.  

Along came Covid

Along came Covid in 2020, and all sorts of things blew up. And particularly, questions were raised in the US about how did Covid begin and were the Chinese cooperating? You should know for the record that at the beginning of Covid, US and Chinese researchers were indeed cooperating. That’s how the code for the source of the Covid virus was shared between China and the US because of cooperation from Chinese scientists. But as the US President got caught up using words like the Kung Fu flu, it politicized everything; collaboration in global health, in particular, began to decline, and then we had, of course, the infamous China Initiative.

The China Initiative, from the US Department of Justice from 2018 to 2022, was a program that aspired to combat economic espionage by prosecuting perceived Chinese spies in research and industry. It was like dumping a boatload of toxins on the bilateral cooperative relationship.  Chinese American scientists who had been thriving in the US and had become major contributors to scientific and technological advance in the US, began to have their loyalty questioned; all sorts of accusations were laid out. The China Initiative has ended, but to this day the accusations and the suspicions have left a lot of Chinese American scientists feeling uneasy. Many of them will not collaborate again with their former partners in China. That relationship has been tainted. Nobody knows for how long, but previous collaborations in many areas have now died.

The whole situation surrounding S&T cooperation exploded.  Chinese were accused of exploiting the openness of the US research system; some in the US suggested the door to Chinese had to be closed. But the reality is that for every case that was prosecuted under the China Initiative, almost all of them failed. They couldn’t find sufficient evidence or examples.

The reality was that among the Chinese American scientists that had fingers pointed at them, the majority may have been guilty of only two things, tax evasion and not notifying their dean that they were engaged in some compensated research on the Chinese side, extending beyond their 12-month contract. Most academic contracts are nine months paid over 12 months.

Under programs such as China’s 1,000 Talents plan, Chinese-American scientists were spending a large amount of time in China and a large amount of time in the US, and then you got one plus one equals three. Many did break their employment contracts, so they were guilty of some things, but also many of the deans didn’t want to lose their Chinese American scientists or engineers. There was a don’t ask, don’t tell attitude.  This had been going on for many years. I saw it when I was at various universities in senior administrative roles, and I can tell you, people didn’t want to know about it. On the US side, we weren’t looking at the at the situation closely enough, and if we were, we didn’t really want to know, because we didn’t want to lose these very good people.

The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in the House of Representatives, chaired formerly by Mike Gallagher (R-WI), wrote a letter to the State Department advocating that the STA agreement not be renewed, that it was a threat to the wellbeing of the US, and that the Chinese were abusing it. Therefore, we should not have an S&T relationship. One of the things Gallagher cited in the letter was that the Chinese sending an air balloon over the US happened because through the STA we enabled them to have that capacity by cooperating in atmospheric science. It’s ridiculous, but that’s what they wrote. That letter became public and put another ding into the effort to go forward with the negotiations.

What happens if the STA expires

The end of this agreement, if indeed it does expire, will be to the detriment of the US. Whatever one thinks about China, one must think about the interests of the US. During the initial period, even though we always talked about mutual benefit, there was an asymmetrical hierarchical relationship. China had more to gain than the US, but we were willing to accept that because our goal was to make China into a stable, modernized country.  We were more than happy to work with China to train Chinese scientists and to do what needed to be done. In fact, the National Natural Science Foundation of China is modeled after the US National Science Foundation.

China adopted a lot of the norms, values and practices of the US to put in place within their S&T system and in their universities. It’s a credit to us. Even in things like peer review, the Chinese learned a lot from their interaction with the US, and we were more than happy to see China move in directions that were highly aligned with the values and the principles that we think are important in the research environment.

If we end the STA, we will dampen bilateral research collaboration. Ironically, now China really has S&T capabilities and the ability to provide mutual benefit. We have as much to gain as the Chinese have to gain through cooperation. Why would we want to shut the door to collaboration at a time when we can materially benefit from the Chinese knowledge network?

One of the big problems in China at the outset of the STA was that their talent base was insufficient and it was not well trained. Now China has several world-class universities, world-class research institutes, and an enormous talent pool.  The net addition of Chinese brain power to the solution of global problems can benefit not only China, but the US and the rest of the world. Why would we step away from one of the richest, most capable talent pools in the world? Moreover, delinking will do irreparable damage to the global ecosystem for scientific discovery and innovation.

There are all sorts of negative economic consequences, but most important is the symbolic statement. There is what I call a “trust deficit” between the two countries. And the trust deficit spills over into an area where there once was great trust, great confidence, and positive vibes. But if we delink from the S&T relationship, it will say to the Chinese, we don’t trust you enough to collaborate with you. And then I say, woe be to us, because if there’s any hope of solving the major global challenges, issues like climate change, the US must cooperate with China to find meaningful solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Then there are issues that are of specific interest to both societies, like finding a cure for cancer and for Alzheimer’s disease. These are two big disease areas that are affecting China and the US; we can do some tremendous work if we have an opportunity.  This is very, very important.  By studying the brain, we not only can advance computing and neural networks, but the study of the brain is also linked to Alzheimer’s disease and diseases related to it.

We really need to step back for a moment and say, not ‘What is the risk?’, but ‘What is the return?’. And then once we understand what the return could be, we can better manage the risk. It’s not that the risk is zero. It’s just that the risk is not as great as some people make it out to be, and the return is much greater than some people believe. I think that this is where we need to end up. In forty plus years, I have never made a trip to China where I didn’t learn something new about the way the Chinese think about the world.

The big question I keep hearing from both sides is whether the two governments have the political will to sign a renewed, renegotiated agreement, and particularly, does the US have the political will to do that in an election year?   Unfortunately, there is a sense that we may negotiate all the technical parameters of a new STA, but at the end of the day, it’s a political decision, go or no go. And that’s where the biggest question mark ultimately lies.

Revising the STA for a new era

The STA agreement does need to be renegotiated, simply because issues like data security and cybersecurity, which were not issues in the early 1980s and through most of the 1990s, have now become big issues, together with the national security dimensions of the relationship, because of the fear that the STA is helping to aid China’s military development.

US policy makers have this idea of “a small yard, high fence policy,” that we can circle the wagons around some very specific areas, but we push ahead with the more general areas that we can. Climate change, global health, food security, clean energy seemingly are more innocuous areas. They don’t directly tie into national security. Though, of course, we can tie everything into national security if we ultimately want to do that.

We must ask the fundamental question, is it in the interest of the US to have a good working collaboration with China in science and technology? My argument is whether China is foe or China as friend, the US needs to have access to what’s going on in China. We need to avoid technological surprise.

China is hard enough to understand because of transparency differences in our two societies. If we have very limited access to Chinese scientists, to Chinese scientific institutions, and to Chinese universities, at some point in time, if we continue down the current road, we’re going to end up in a place that will take us 10 years to undo because of the hurt feelings, loss of face, and the disconnections that will have occurred.

Ronald Reagan said in dealing with the former Soviet Union about arms control, ‘Trust but verify’. We need to fix the trust deficit, but we also need to have some consequences for misbehaviors. Retaining a joint commission, in my opinion, is important, because we need a bilateral body to review any new agreement. There will be new aspects to the agreement. We may develop new concerns that now have not yet been talked about; if we find the agreement is not working, we need to have a vehicle to solve problems.

Currently, I’m involved in the US-China Higher Education Dialogue between the Institute of International Education and the China Education Association for International Exchange. We had a successful meeting in September 2023 in which we began to talk about not just highlighting problems, but about fixing problems, campus issues, academic freedom issues, and visa issues. We will meet again in October 2024 and begin to work on finding practical solutions to problems that both sides have on reciprocal access.

The Chinese want to know that their people, students and scholars are not going to be hassled when they come into the US or they take up a position, and they don’t want to feel like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is following them everywhere they go. We need to make both sides feel much more comfortable and safe. And we need to, as Chairman Mao used to say, ‘Seek truth from facts,’ not hyperbole.

The relationship has become too caught up in vast hyperbole and not enough caught up in facts.  One of the biggest failures of both countries has been that we have not documented in any kind of comprehensive way the key successes and achievements of the bilateral S&T and education relationship. We don’t have enough documented case studies. There is no compendium that documents what’s gone on between 1979 and  2024 in which we highlight those cases where the two countries have mutually benefited through their collaboration.  A good example of such success is bilateral cooperation focused on understanding the role of folic acid in preventing neural tube defects in babies.

It’s not going to be a perfect world in which the Chinese are always happy every day and we’re happy every day, but case studies would have provided a lot of raw material that someone could look at and say, ‘You see, it’s not really been a one way relationship, and you see it’s not been as detrimental or harmful as you claim’. The reality is that it’s often been mutually beneficial.  

If we have a bilateral STA agreement, it will encourage our respective universities, research institutes and companies to go forward and collaborate. The lack of an agreement will become a hindrance in ways that we haven’t even begun to imagine. If you’re in favor of delinking and disengaging from China, if you let the STA expire, you’ll take a giant step forward, because that’s the kind of damage non-renewal will do to the relationship.

We ought to state in a new STA clearly and explicitly that we are signing this agreement as an agreement for non-military science and technology, and that both sides agree, at least in principle, that they will make a good-faith effort to limit unintended knowledge transfers. Both countries are sovereign countries, and so once technology crosses the border, it’s difficult to know exactly if it’s going to leak into some place where it wasn’t intended.  Nonetheless, we ought to establish a good faith principle.

“We are at a moment of a great sea change”

We are at a moment in time of a great sea change, and we’re not prepared. We’re trying to hold off the Chinese by keeping them at bay, denying them access, denying them opportunities for collaboration, or maybe even shutting down university education exchanges. The recent “China Week” launched by members of Congress contained legislation primarily designed to curtail PRC access to American know-how, such as the BioSecure Act.  This is just wrong-headed. The world is changing, and being so-called Number One, the Lone Ranger at the top, is not the world of the 21st century.

These days scientists and engineers around the world primarily are engaged in cross-border, transnational knowledge networks. Rarely do we see technology being discovered independently of other countries. Take the Boeing 777, 787, and Boeing’s future airplanes, Japan, Italy, Canada and other countries will all play a role. The notion that we’re going to do this on our own somehow is just ludicrous, because we don’t have enough money, we don’t have enough people, and most important, we don’t have enough time to do it on our own.

We seem to be looking at the world through the lens of the 1950s and 1960s while the world around us has fundamentally changed. In this new world or new era, China is an important player and we need to take stock of it – not by pushing it away but trying to embed it more deeply into the global S&T system and taking advantage of what China has to offer.

Just as China has taken advantage of us, sometimes we can take advantage of China, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean it in a reciprocal sense, because now China has something to offer, and we ought to be standing ready to take advantage of our access to that.  This is what win-win is all about.

*Note: There are three categories for universities granting doctorates in the US – R1 (very high research activity), R2 (high research activity) and D/PU (doctoral/professional universities).

This artilce was originally published on the website of AmCham HK in its Septmber/October 2024 volume e-Magazine