The U.S. Is Turning Away From Its Biggest Scientific Partner at a Precarious Time
U.S. moves to cut research ties with China over security concerns threaten American progress in critical areas, some scientists warn
The Battle for Scientific Supremacy
China has been growing as a scientific powerhouse in recent decades. In 2019, according to Wagner’s analysis, its researchers for the first time surpassed their U.S. counterparts in the share of the 1% most-cited papers, often known as the Nobel Prize tier. The following year, China-based scholars also passed the Americans in the share of the 10% most-cited papers, Wagner said.
Some say this is partly a result of Chinese researchers’ citing each other’s papers. A report by Japan’s education ministry based on Clarivate’s data, covering papers published from 2019 to 2021, found that 61% of Chinese citations were by other China-based researchers, while just 29% of the citations of U.S. papers came from domestic peers.
Clarivate said its science database counts only the highest-quality papers and weeds out Chinese researchers gaming their way into top-tier metrics.
There is no question that China’s scientific community has made big strides and now rivals the U.S.’s in many ways. That competition has fueled debate among U.S. policy makers about whether unfettered scientific collaboration is giving Beijing free rein to exploit America’s cutting-edge research and the keys to undermine the U.S. innovation advantage.
“The U.S. is picking up on the fact that the open system that we praise and we hold as one of our key strengths is potentially also creating a decent vulnerability for us,” said Emily Weinstein from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a think tank at Georgetown University.
These concerns have grown with the accelerating pace of advancements in emerging technology fields such as AI, biotech and quantum, where drawing clear distinctions between military and civilian uses is difficult.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), the chairman of a congressional select committee on China, is leading a push to let the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement expire. First signed shortly after the two countries established diplomatic relations, it has been renewed around every five years since.
In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June, Gallagher and nine other Republican representatives argued that the U.S. is aiding China’s military modernization through the agreement.
“The United States must stop fueling its own destruction,” the letter said.
The White House declined to comment on the agreement and whether it will be renewed.
Scientific ties between the two countries have been deteriorating since 2018, when the Justice Department launched its China Initiative to sniff out Chinese economic espionage. Over time, the program came to focus on interactions between American academics and Chinese institutions. The National Institutes of Health engaged in a parallel campaign, opening up hundreds of investigations into U.S.-based scientists with ties to China.
The two programs, which largely failed to turn up criminal conduct, cast a chill over scientific collaborations and sparked an exodus of Chinese scientists from American institutions.
The Costs of Divorce
Many scientists counter calls for further decoupling by pointing to successful ways the U.S. has worked with China.
One example is a clean-energy partnership signed in 2011 by then-President Barack Obama and China’s then-leader Hu Jintao. The agreement generated more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, 26 patent applications and 15 product launches, and boosted U.S.-China climate cooperation that helped lay the groundwork for the Paris Agreement.
Key to the partnership was an insistence that the collaborators work out mechanisms to protect the intellectual property of participants, according to Mark Crocker, a University of Kentucky chemistry professor who received funding from the partnership. He said that helped him leverage China’s manufacturing know-how to commercialize a new technology that uses algae to capture carbon-dioxide emissions and transform them into useful products such as biofuels.
Granted access to growing flows of data from China’s burgeoning electric-vehicle sector, American and Chinese scientists in the partnership developed a better grasp on how to improve the quality and safety of lithium-ion batteries. The agreement expired in 2020.
Chinese researchers have leapt ahead of their American counterparts in the field of energy storage, according to a 2021 U.S. government report, and Clarivate’s analysis shows China driving scientific output in other strategic areas. That includes basic science around semiconductors, where China collaborations account for 20% of papers produced in the U.S.
Scientists interviewed by the Journal said they don’t tend to view their work in terms of national competition, but several said the possibility that their work could hurt the U.S. has been troubling. Many also expressed concerns that as their access to Chinese research diminished, they would lose insights into what Chinese researchers are doing.
The most-cited paper in the more-than-40-year career of Ian Hiskens, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan, was published in 2011 with Ma Zhongjing, a Chinese engineer who had come to Michigan for postdoctoral research. The paper was about how to coordinate the charging of electric vehicles, Hiskens said.
“Ma had the best mathematical tools and was the best in his field. And I knew a lot about power grids,” he said.
Ma went on to become a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, one of the so-called Seven Sons of National Defense—Chinese universities where some faculty maintain close ties to the country’s defense industry. While Ma’s research appears to have remained strictly civilian, it has become challenging to gain approval for new projects, which makes future collaboration a no-go, said Hiskens.
The cost to human progress of severing U.S.-China science ties will be hard to measure. “There is no global problem that doesn’t require close U.S.-China collaboration,” said Denis Simon, who this month resigned as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to protest what he described as an increasingly hostile attitude in the U.S. toward scientific engagement with China.
UNC Chapel Hill said it couldn’t comment on personnel matters, adding that it was committed to maintaining the university’s research integrity.
Xia, the professor of medicine at UCLA, said he has stopped his research on birth defects because he doesn’t know how to work with embryonic stem cells. That was the expertise of his Chinese collaborators.
“It’s a pity,“ Xia said. “In science we try to find the truth in nature for everybody—not for which country or some power. Now you can achieve more progress at the cost of being scrutinized. Then it’s not really worth it.”
Write to Karen Hao at karen.hao@wsj.com and Sha Hua at sha.hua@wsj.com