A landmark agreement underpinning decades of U.S.-China research cooperation narrowly escaped death this week after the Biden administration announced it would seek a brief extension to the pact, bucking pressure from Republican lawmakers and highlighting how scientific collaborations have emerged as a key flash point amid rising tensions.
Since taking force in 1979, the U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement (STA) has set the norms for scientific collaboration between Washington and Beijing in areas ranging from air pollution to public health—as long as it is renewed, as it always has been roughly every five years. With its next expiration date looming on Sunday, a group of Republicans had urged the Biden administration to terminate the pact, part of a broader push as Washington zeroes in on the threats posed by China’s intellectual property theft and espionage.
By briefly extending the agreement for six months—rather than renewing it for another five-year period—experts and officials say the Biden administration may have more room to exert pressure on Beijing and negotiate amendments, such as boosting intellectual property protections. China attaches symbolic importance to the pact, said E. William Colglazier, a former science and technology advisor to the U.S. secretary of state currently at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Chinese officials have called for its continuation.
“The proposition behind a relatively short-term renewal would be to use that period to engage in intense discussions with the Chinese counterparts on any changes that the two sides could agree to that would strengthen the agreement,” John Holdren, a former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy currently at the Harvard Kennedy School, said on Tuesday. “The main thing is: Let’s not drop it. Let’s not let it expire.”
If the 44-year-old pact expired, its end would deal yet another blow to already faltering U.S.-China scientific collaborations—and Washington’s own tech ambitions. As relations deteriorate, the resulting pressures have cascaded into the research arena, straining existing university partnerships and stifling academic exchanges. Confronted with a chillier research climate, a small—but growing—number of Chinese scientists are seeking opportunities outside the United States. The collapse of this agreement, experts warn, could accelerate these trends.
“Without the implicit permission that the existence of this overarching framework provides, there will be many institutions, many individuals, who would simply not engage with their Chinese counterparts because they would consider it something that the government does not consider a good thing to do,” Holdren said. “A lot of the interactions wouldn’t happen.”
Graham Webster, a research scholar at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, characterized the push to allow the STA to expire as an example of “boneheaded decoupling.” While there are very legitimate debates about what kind of restrictions should be implemented, he said, it’s not reasonable to assert that there are no benefits to U.S.-China collaborations in science and technology.
“There’s no real reckoning with the plusses and minuses of an individual interaction with China,” he said. “There’s only the assumption that if there’s a downside, we have to kill it.”
Science and technology agreements themselves are not unique; Washington has signed nearly 60 such pacts with other countries that effectively legitimize research collaborations, offering a broader framework for American researchers and institutions to engage with the world. While having an STA is not required for cooperation in those fields, “it does give the blessing of both sides,” said Mark Cohen, the Asia IP Project director at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
For Washington and Beijing, the creation of the U.S.-China STA is historically significant, representing the two countries’ first bilateral agreement after they normalized relations. Ever since, the agreement has been continuously renewed—albeit with a lapse after China crushed the Tiananmen protests in 1989—and undergone multiple alterations.
“The STA is part of the foundational reopening of U.S.-China ties,” Webster said. “It’s become important because it’s the backdrop for the two countries to have many of their scientific and technological exchanges over the decades.”|
This landscape has transformed considerably in recent decades as Beijing has revamped itself into a science research powerhouse and lawmakers ramp up efforts to combat Chinese IP theft and economic espionage. The latest scrutiny over the STA’s expiration reflects how science and tech collaborations have become completely enmeshed with national security concerns and economic competition—and the challenge in weighing the risks of cooperation against the benefits.