Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Karen Hao and Deborah Seligsohn. https://thechinaproject.com/2023/09/07/the-case-for-the-u-s-china-science-and-technology-agreement/
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to not only our great newsletter, the daily Dispatch, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
For 40 years, an agreement signed in 1979 between the U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and then paramount Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, on scientific and technological cooperation between the U.S. and China was renewed every five years, except briefly after Tiananmen in 1989 without much fuss or fanfare until this year. In late August, the Biden administration, under pressure from some legislators not to renew the agreement, decided instead to provisionally extend it for six months, a stay of execution as it were, with U.S.-China relations so badly frayed with technology so central to the tensions in that bilateral relationship and to Sino-American Competition more broadly. Given the association that so many congressional Republicans especially seem to have between COVID-19 and the U.S.-China research collaboration in places like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, NIH funding for that sort of thing, it’s no wonder that it has come under attack from those quarters.
My guests today, though, are well-versed in the many, many benefits born of this 44-year period of collaboration since the agreement was signed. Karen Hao is a reporter who was, until very recently, with the Wall Street Journal, and one of her last major pieces was a long article titled The U.S. Is Turning Away From Its Biggest Scientific Partner At a Precarious Time. Karen, who joins us today from Hong Kong, has done amazing work at other publications too, especially at the MIT Technology Review, where she was covering, among other things, AI. You might also recall that a show I recorded about two years ago with her two former colleagues, Jess Aloe and Eileen Guo, was about a series of articles, which she was co-author of. These really kind of landed a good body blow to the odious “China Initiative.” Really great. You should check those out. They’re from December of 2021. Karen, you weren’t able to join for that one. It was a real pity, but I am even more glad that you’re able to make time for this. Karen Hao, welcome to Sinica.
Karen Hao: Thank you so much, Kaiser.
Kaiser: One of the people who Karen interviewed for that journal piece on the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement was my other guest today who Sinica listeners doubtless know from her many appearances on the show — Deborah Seligsohn. She is an assistant professor in political science at Villanova University in Philadelphia, but just as importantly for today’s show, she served as the environment science, technology, and health counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007. Debbi, my good friend, welcome back to the podcast, and great to see you.
Deborah Seligsohn: Thank you, Kaiser. Good to see you too.
Kaiser: Let’s talk first about the history of this agreement. Karen, in your piece, and many people you interviewed make this point, you argue that we, the U.S., are really kind of the principal beneficiaries of this agreement, but surely that wasn’t the case back in 1979 when China still wasn’t the scientific sort of superpower that it is now. What was the rationale back then for this agreement?
Karen: I mean, so much of what I know about this is from Debb, so she should definitely chime in after me, but this was the first agreement that was ever signed after the U.S. and China established bilateral relations. So, there were benefits beyond just the science collaboration aspect of it. There was actual mutual stabilizing geopolitical relations that came out of this agreement. At the time, obviously, China signed the agreement because they wanted to learn a lot from the U.S. as a scientific power and understand how to become their own scientific engine. But for the U.S. there were just a lot of things that China had as well that were very intriguing to U.S. scientists, both the literal natural resources that China had, the population in helping understand different health conditions or rare diseases.
Things like when it comes to climate change, being able to actually measure things around the world, or astronomy, being able to look at the stars from different points of the world. There were many reasons, even when China was not at all a scientific power, it was very beneficial for the U.S. to actually be involved in this kind of cooperation.
Kaiser: Debb—Karen laid out a lot of really important points for why that is. Do you have anything to add to that?
Debbi: Yeah. What’s interesting is that the original idea was part of an idea that the U.S. wanted China to be an important trading partner, and they actually believed that in helping China develop, it was helping develop a market for U.S. goods. This idea of science and technology, it was a time when there was a shift in the U.S. from thinking of science and technology, mostly in terms of the national defense, if we think back to the ’60s, to thinking about the importance of economics and scientific research, developing an economy was becoming a predominant idea. That was part of what actually inspired the U.S. to want a good relationship with China on science and technology. From the beginning, there was just all of this stuff, plate tectonics and biology and everything you could imagine. But by the mid-1980s, the value of Chinese graduate students had become very clear.
That starts with the Chinese University of Science and Technology in Hefei and the physics students that came from there. But eventually, every scientific discipline realized it was an enormous country within an ever-growing university population. I think what’s really important to remember is that over the last four and a half decades, the Chinese university population has grown many, many fold, which is not true of all developing countries, and so the supply of potential Ph.D. students has just ever increased. But that was certainly a discovery relatively early on that had not been thought about when the agreement was originally signed.
Kaiser: Debb, as you know, there was this webinar a few weeks back put on by UC Berkeley, my alma mater, that was organized by folks like Denis Simon, who was, until recently, here at UNC-Chapel Hill. I know you spoke on one of those panels at that event. John Holdren, who is an eminent scientist, who was senior advisor to President Obama on science and technology, delivered the opening keynote there. I had a chance to see that. Actually, he sent me his PowerPoint from it. I was looking at it and I think he covers a lot of the exact same points that Karen and you just laid out in terms of what was the rationale for it and why he’s in favor of not just the STA with China, but with science and technology agreements STAs more generally.
He noted that access to these agreements, like Karen said, gave you whole networks of researchers who are close to the ground and like, as you say, for public health reasons, but also, as it turns out, they’re very inexpensive, a whole lot cheaper than us operating satellite offices ourselves and staffing them ourselves. ST capacity building in developing countries feeds into our pipeline, right? I mean, of our ST talent, but also that it’s inherently kind of politically stabilizing. I wanted to bring this up because I had a conversation with Chas Freeman who was, I think in 1979, still working on the U.S.-China relationship in some capacity. He was DCM at the first U.S. Embassy opened in Beijing, I believe.
He said that the U.S. wanted to, I think the word he used was “entangle” China in whole networks of low-level relationships and things like that. That this would be stabilizing in a foreign policy sense. That it would sort of deter China from ever going down the path of export of revolution again. He also talked about, like you said, access to markets. Building banking trust and diplomatic capital for later on. And he warned that we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater as it were. But he also talked about reasons to try to manage the relationship. That there are risks. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that because there are people who will inevitably raise, “But the Chinese will just use this to steal our IP.” Or the other one, of course, which is the standard national security hawk thing about, well, all these dual-use technologies, won’t they inevitably fall into the hands of the PLA and sort of hasten their modernization and make it more difficult for us to deter aggression? How do you guys answer these criticisms?
Karen: Well, I do think it is really important to have the risk conversation because it does get tricky when you’re talking about technologies like AI or quantum computing, where you can have civilian uses, you can have military uses. I guess the way that I would answer this is twofold. One, when it comes to AI, and AI is the thing that I’m most familiar with, so I’ll talk more about that. The AI community itself really values international collaboration because they think it’s a way of mitigating risks. Just a few months ago, there was a conference hosted by the Beijing AI Academy, BAAI, that brought together leading AI experts from both the U.S. and China. Sam Altman dialed in, CEO of OpenAI. An executive from Anthropic dialed in.
There were professors from MIT, from other universities, as well as their counterparts in China from Tsinghua, from Beida, and other companies within the Chinese AI ecosystem. The reason why they were talking and coming together was specifically to coordinate on how to develop this technology in a more responsible way and mitigate risk. So, I think the way that I respond to this usually is we should also be looking at the scientists and the researchers and the experts themselves on what they’re doing because they actually think it is of paramount importance right now to be coordinating with one another such that the technology is developed in a way that is globally beneficial. If they’re doing that, then why are we trying at the government level to then try to sever those ties? Clearly, those people think that it’s really important to be talking to each other at this time.
When it comes to IP theft, one of the things that I would want to clarify is that a lot of this scientific collaboration that happens is at a very early stage. It takes many more years, sometimes decades, to develop IP from this scientific research. I think that’s kind of a distinction that gets lost in the conversation. When we’re talking about collaborating on science, we’re talking about open academic research, open academic data that does not have IP associated with it. But of course, that then becomes the foundation for IP development. There actually have been examples in the U.S.-China relationship where there have been successful mechanisms developed for facilitating scientific collaboration that transitions into IP innovation that were designed to make sure that there wouldn’t be concerns around theft.
During the U.S.-China Clean Energy Cooperation, which my colleague Sha Hua reported a lot on for our piece, there was this specific mechanism that guaranteed that any American scientist who wanted to tap into Chinese manufacturers or the Chinese market would be able to protect their IP. It was very successful. The cooperation generated a lot of academic papers, and it generated a lot of patents. My colleague Sha Hua spoke with a scientist who was part of this cooperation, Mark Crocker, at the University of Kentucky, who said that he had this bioreactor that was like a climate technology that was really important for extracting carbon emissions from the air, and it would not have been possible to develop and commercialize it had he not had this partnership. And he felt comfortable entering this partnership because of the mechanisms that had been negotiated at the government-to-government level as part of this Clean Energy Cooperation.
Kaiser: Yeah. That was 2011. And I mean that one seemed like a no-brainer, a very positive case. I think it was 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals. It had 26 patents, and like 15 product launches came out of this. But you guys also talked about this really laid the groundwork for Paris, right? I was talking about banking diplomatic trust. That’s exactly what was happening there.
Debbi: If I could add a couple of things. I was a member of one of the clean energy research centers, The Cole Center, which led the negotiations on intellectual property. It was actually led by the companies. The U.S. government then agreed to it, as did the Chinese government, but it wasn’t ignoring company interests. In fact, it was company-hired lawyers who did the spade work on it. Because that was a very unusual agreement under the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement in that it was specifically designed to be a public-private partnership. There was a goal to produce things, patentable technologies to address climate change. That hasn’t been typical of the S&T Agreement. Much more typical or either the kind of pure research that Karen was talking about earlier or kinds of public goods, policy-oriented collaborative work.
All of the work that we’ve done on public health, most of it didn’t involve any new technology at all. Helping the Chinese get a system going to ensure childhood vaccination doesn’t require any new technology, but it does mean that all children around the world are safer because a measles outbreak in one place is a measles outbreak at Disneyland. Similarly, the work that was done on helping China with its pretty effective battle against some air pollutants was a lot about helping them know about our experience and how to use continuous emissions monitoring equipment. I mean, that’s off-the-shelf equipment. It’s been around forever. It’s just how you set it up, how you monitor the companies, that kind of thing. People will point out that under this 44-year agreement, there have been relatively few patents actually because most of the stuff done was not done with an eye toward immediate stuff for the market.
What I would say, looking at the issue now, is that the Biden administration has already put into effect a lot of controls on technology. And those are much more focused, whether it’s the export control regime or whether it’s controls on outbound investment, those are very much focused on close to or ready for market technologies. And the S&T Agreement is really not. When we’re looking at stuff that is decades out, we really should be thinking differently. Some of it will never be profitable. Some of it is stuff we need to do for climate change that we’re just going to have to spend a bunch of government money to do.
Kaiser: You made these points very, very well in the piece that you wrote. I should make sure that we put a link to that one you wrote for CSIS. Debb, staying with you for a second, I remember we had a conversation once, I can’t remember the context exactly, but we were talking about how the kind of baseline belief among many Americans is that China’s entire technological progress to date was built on the back of stolen IP. This seems to still very much inform how at least the G.O.P. approaches this. I want to get at what is driving opposition to it. I suggested in the intro that it’s just a natural target for right-wing populists because it kind of combines their xenophobia, which has just been flaring up so badly of late with their anti-scientific tendencies.
I can only guess that among Republicans who’ve been most vocal in opposing the renewal of this agreement, there must be a lot of overlap with people who pushed for the ban on federal funding or NIH funding or anything to WIV or any China-based virology research. I know Mike Gallagher, who is the chairman of the Select Committee, he was the one who led this charge. With nine other Republicans. What’s behind this? Is this politics? Is this fear? I mean, what’s going on here?
Debbi: Well, clearly those two things are not in contradiction with each other.
Kaiser: Sure.
Debbi: I think the politics are very much driven by an anxiety about the United States’ place in the world. Going back to the 1990s, some of our self-congratulation was not helpful—the indispensable nation, the sole superpower, etc. We’re now paying the cost for that, both in conflicts abroad, and I point to Russia, not that we’re responsible for Putin, but that we weren’t thinking ahead enough to think about how that might happen and how we wanted to prepare. But we’re also paying for it at home because people feel that the United States has somehow lost prestige in a way that makes them very nervous. It is true that in many of these scientific areas, China is now a peer. The thing about that is that’s a fact, and that’s not going to go away.
I also don’t think we could have avoided it. China is an enormous country with enormous resources that has chosen over, especially over the last 44 years, to invest heavily in its human capital. And so that was going to happen. The thing that we’re missing in all this is the way we maintain being the preeminent scientific nation, which we are, is because we’re the most open. We are the country that people from all over the world want to come and do research with. They sometimes stay, they sometimes go home. They continue to work with our scientists. I was talking to someone about European scientific collaboration, and the Europeans have a big issue about whether the Chinese have enough Europeans in their labs relative to the number of Chinese in European labs.
That’s never come up as an issue with the U.S. because Chinese scientists have come to the U.S., became Americans and still have strong ties where they know what’s going on inside Chinese labs. The idea that we don’t know would be a fallacy, right?
Kaiser: Right.
Debbi: It’s about welcoming everybody and working with everybody, and that’s what enables us to maintain our excellence. That’s why I don’t think that China actually has much chance of surpassing us because most scientists actually don’t find it very easy to go work in Chinese labs, and it isn’t a country with even difficult immigration. So, I think the anxiety is misplaced, but it is very real.
Kaiser: Karen, the piece that you wrote with Sha Hua, one of; the central argument is that we need China, we Americans need China as much as they need us, and we benefit; actually, we benefit quite a bit from this. And central in that argument is this great chart you have that shows the share of papers produced in the U.S. by partnership. Where I think that that would be a compelling argument in favor of continuation, there are probably some people who would look at this and say, “You see, China’s catching up with us, and this is all our fault, and we have to stop before they surpass us.” They’ll look at the areas in which China has contributed really meaningfully in these collaborations and see them as points of vulnerability in telecoms and in nanomaterials and things like that. What would you say to that?
Karen: The data from this chart comes from Clarivate. It was looking at the papers that are published globally in high-quality journals. Clarivate has all these metrics to basically filter out anything that might be low-quality.
Kaiser: Paper mills, yeah.
Karen: Yeah. It looks specifically at some strategic scientific areas like telecommunications, nanoscience, fuel and energy. And you just see that the share of papers that the U.S. collaborates on with China has really grown. In telecommunications, 33% of papers that have U.S. scientists on them also have Chinese scientists on them. They’re co-authorships. In nanoscience, it’s 28%. In fuel and energy, it’s 27%. There’s actually another chart that we didn’t put in here because we didn’t have the raw data on it, but it’s from a U.S. government report that also looks at China’s leadership in the basic energy sciences, which includes quantum communications and energy storage. And you also see this just really rapidly rising curve in terms of the share of papers that China’s producing globally in that particular field. When it comes to batteries and when it comes to quantum communications via satellites, China’s just like leaping ahead.
I guess the concern that people have that China is somehow always secondary to the U.S. in science, the movement of ideas is always one directional from the U.S. to China is just no longer true. Maybe that was true when the STA was first signed, but now, China has become its own scientific superpower. Like Debbi said, the U.S. is still unchallenged, it’s number one, but there are specific fields in which China has become number one, like batteries. Part of the reason is because China has really large manufacturing capacity, and science often relies on real-world data. You need real-world data from manufacturers in batteries to perform battery safety research, just as one example. China has that. The U.S. doesn’t have this manufacturing capacity at home anymore.
These kinds of collaborations, like the clean energy collaboration, are very bidirectional. There was actually data shared from China’s burgeoning battery industry under that agreement to U.S. scientists who could then do better science because they had this real-world data at their fingertips. It’s the same story when it comes to other areas where there’s now very expensive equipment that needs to be used as part of production science. I interviewed this U.S.-based scientist, Tian Xia, who is a professor of medicine at UCLA, and he’s a nanotoxicologist, which is a very fancy word for saying he studies tiny things that affect the human body. In that field, you need a lot of people and you need a lot of equipment to essentially study these microscopic particles in every different dimension.
You have to study how they impact you when they’re inhaled versus ingested versus on your skin. They study whether it impacts your lungs, whether it impacts you as a kid, or when you’re older, or whether you’re pregnant. There’s just so many different dimensions that have to be studied and there are many expensive pieces of equipment that have to be used. He just said that, first of all, China just has a lot of grad students. Every lab has just so many more grad students than his lab in the U.S. or any of his American colleagues. And they have the equipment to do this work. So, they’re able to do it at scale, at high quality. And he benefits from that when he collaborates with Chinese counterparts. Unfortunately, in his case, which was true of many of the scientists we interviewed, he’s no longer collaborating with his China-based colleagues because he is just really, really nervous now about becoming a target in this kind of political ostracization of scientists who work with Chinese counterparts. So, he’s no longer able to do the kind of work that he used to be able to do.
Kaiser: Yeah. That is just one of the many repercussions of non-renewal, I think, that the China Initiative may be, sort of in name, no longer, but in effect, it still is. If you talk to Chinese researchers, they’re still feeling very much under the gun because of this stuff. We will get into some of the deleterious effects of non-renewal in a bit. But you talked a little bit about energy storage and batteries and the Chinese lead right now in EV batteries. People may not be cognizant of how much scientific collaboration there is in R&D, but surely, they’re aware of the controversies that have hit in states like Michigan and Virginia over, I mean, maybe they haven’t stopped and thought about it, but we are talking here about licensing Chinese technologies for production in the United States. That really ought to hit home. They should realize at least that the osmotic gradient isn’t in one direction anymore, as you said, right?
Karen: Exactly. We’re licensing Chinese technology because they’re the best in the world now when it comes to batteries.
Debbi: And that means we benefit, right?
Kaiser: Yeah, exactly.
Debbi: I mean, the fundamental thing is if it seemed like it was more one way 44 years ago, and actually even from the early days, you can come up with examples like Artemisinin to treat malaria that was found in China and has been really critical.
Kaiser: Yeah. Won Tu Youyou a Nobel prize.
Debbi: Right. Even from the beginning, there were really important Chinese contributions, but you could definitely say it was not even. But the more even it is, the more we benefit.
Kaiser: The irony, though, is that the more even it is, the more threatened some of us feel.
Debbi: That’s why I want to go back to your question about IP because the thing is that most of this is public information, right? It’s going to be peer reviewed and published. And so it isn’t actually very closely related to intellectual property. The other thing is, if you talk to U.S. companies today, intellectual property theft actually isn’t very high on their list of concerns with China. China now generates a great deal of intellectual property, so they actually have put a certain amount of effort into protecting it. This is the story that has happened with all industrializing nations. As they start to innovate, they start to protect their IP, and as a result, they wind up protecting everybody else’s as well. I’m not saying everything is golden, nor am I saying that nobody in the U.S. ever watches a bootleg film, but the situation is not at all what it was in the early ’90s.
Kaiser: Well, the political complaint always is sort of a lagging indicator. I mean, there’s still people talking about currency manipulation, which is a pretty old one. But yeah, I think, the conventional wisdom out there among the great unwashed in America is still that China is this gigantic, rampant IP violator, and that all of its success can be chalked up to theft. What are we going to do? I wanted to maybe throw something out there. We do have one example of when collaboration in one area was cut off completely. I’m not talking just about what happened in October of last year. I’m talking about 2011 when Frank Wolf got his amendment in the Wolf Amendment, which stopped NASA from being able to collaborate in any way with the Chinese Space Agency. And no space exploration cooperation after that happened. What came of the ending of that? Or what did we give up when that ended?
Debbi: The truth is we weren’t doing anything much in space between NASA. There had been some explorations, and then after the Chinese shot down that satellite in 2007, that had pretty much ended. The stuff that the U.S. and China were doing that involved NASA was more like remote sensing stuff on climate change than it was anything to do with space. NASA is actually a really important source of data and research on pollution, on the movement of atmospheric gases. I’m not saying it wasn’t costly at all, but it actually didn’t have much to do with space. The more costly thing that the Wolf Amendment did was put all kinds of impediments in the way of meetings between the Office of the Science and Technology Advisor and Chinese counterparts.
Holdren had a legal advisor’s opinion saying that the law was unconstitutional or something. He continued to do meetings, but I think it was not helpful, and it has impeded the relationship of the offices, that’s during the Obama administration. By the time you get to the Trump administration, I think there’s very little interaction.
Kaiser: I wonder if it’s left us at all in the dark, sort of ignorant of what China is doing in terms of space. I guess this is always the argument that I would use with the hawkish types – don’t they say keep your friends close, put your enemies closer? I mean, if you do insist on framing everything as competition, don’t you want better access to what your competitor is doing?
Debbi: That was certainly the argument that led to the exploration in the 2005, 2006 period. It’s certainly an area where you need careful management because if there’s any area where dual use is a problem, it is absolutely in space exploration. If you go to visit the China National Space Agency, or administration, which is their civilian space exploration unit, it is housed within COSTIND, which is, in fact, the military-industrial complex. That was something during the Bush administration that President Bush was actually personally very interested in exploring. And so there was an effort to figure out how to do it in a measured way. I think that is probably one of the most challenging areas. And as we try to resume contacts, there’s some stuff still going on to this day, but a lot of it got lost between the Trump administration’s general indifference to science of all kinds, and just the loss of contact during zero COVID. As we try to resume things, I would put space toward the bottom of the list.
Kaiser: Okay. So what’s up near the top? In the event that six months from now, somehow the Biden administration does not renew the STA, what are some of the specific projects that are going to be halted or stymied? What’s the price we’re going to pay for those?
Debbi: First of all, we still have a bunch of CDC and a lot of FDA people in China. We have a lot of stuff on public health, on drug safety, on food safety that could be put at risk right away. Secondly, we are increasingly aware of the severity of the climate crisis. Wherever you were this summer, we’ve all lived it, right? I mean, experiencing the first-ever wildfire smoke leading to high levels of pollution on the east coast of the United States this year, and then going to a Beijing that was over 40 degrees almost every day in June when I was there.
Kaiser: Lord.
Debbi: Yeah. It was unbelievable. We need to do more on climate change. I don’t think it’s going to be in the technologies ready for market area. I think that ship has sailed. And also we have so many of those. Those companies should just be competing as companies. We can license from each other and we can compete and we can do whatever, but we need to solve a lot of problems that we haven’t figured out how to solve yet. We have this huge problem that is becoming clearer and clearer that our problem is not 2100 when we’ll probably be an all-renewable society. It’s this idea of overshooting and the temperature that’s going to be in 2035 or 2040. How do we reduce the amount of greenhouse gases between now and then? Which is going to be partly about getting way more serious about gases like methane, where both the U.S. and China have tons of abandoned coal mines that are just seeping methane gas, and none of us know how to deal with that in an economical way, and that seems like a good project.
We have lots and lots of things like that. Ultimately, we’re probably going to need to do direct air capture where we’re literally sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. As Karen said, that was one of the technologies that actually got developed. That’s not ready for the market yet. But those are things in the next 10, 20, 30 years, we’re absolutely going to need to use, and we need to be working together, but we also need to be working together on how to address adaptation, how to work with developing countries to ensure their survival. Many of them are dependent on agriculture, which is going to have to be transformed. There’s a lot of stuff that Chinese know about how to adapt to changes in the weather, more rain, less rain, drought, floods with rice crops, for example, that is going to be very useful in developing countries. I think there’s a ton on the public health side, on the climate side that we should be working together on, and I think we should be focusing on those areas where we clearly see some sort of global public goods benefit.
Kaiser: Yeah. Karen?
Karen: Well, I think one thing that I’ll just add to that, I was speaking with an ocean climate scientist based in the U.S. who did a lot of collaborations with his Chinese counterparts. One of the things he also said about just the pace of science moving faster because he had access to his collaborators was not just that all of them were collecting data like ocean samples from different parts of the world. You need ocean samples from the part of the world that China is in to help paint a global picture. He was studying how do we use oceans as a resource to sequester carbon and also how do we understand what’s happening within the ocean that releases carbon as well, so that we can kind of change, or you use it, leverage it to help with the climate crisis right now.
But the other thing was China is just really good at cheaply sequencing DNA, for example. He needed that as part of his research because they needed, in all of their hundreds and hundreds of ocean samples, they needed to sequence the DNA of the organisms in it to understand what was actually going on so that they could then map out their global understanding of how to use the oceans and what was happening with the oceans. Doing that kind of hundreds of sequencing of samples in the U.S. would’ve just been prohibitively expensive. That was just one small detail, among many others, of ways that these cross-border collaborations with China really did just increase the clip at which they were able to understand things and continue to do science, continue to make discoveries.
Kaiser: It just occurred to me, with China now leading the world in a number of actual gene sequencing machines that they’ve got running, I wonder if they’re going to take a hit because of the semiconductor export ban.
Debbi: I don’t think those are even top-of-the-line technology anymore.
Kaiser: Yeah, I wouldn’t think so.
Debbi: China developed that industry under the Human Genome project back in the 1990s. I’ve been to the Beijing Genomics Institute, it’s rows and rows of these machines being operated by techs who have two years of technical training beyond high school. It’s actually mass production.
Kaiser: Not rocket science. Right, yeah. Anyway, that’s a little off topic, but Karen, I wanted to ask you, Debb brought up space as one of the areas with obvious dual-use implications. But you are an expert in another area, which again, we’ve talked about this has obvious dual-use potential, but it’s also one where the U.S. and China are, by a long shot, the two countries that are the furthest along and really leading the world. We’re talking about not just AI, but all the technologies of the so-called fourth industrial revolution. It seems to me there’s quite a bit of urgency and I’m pleased to see that the Beijing AI Institute has already convened meetings like this, where, hopefully, they were talking about ethics issues. The fact that Sam Altman dialed in, that’s very, very encouraging. But standards for interoperability of different automated systems and that kind of thing. I wonder will this still continue in the absence of the STA? Do we still need the STA framework? Or would such things be prohibited? Would industry be able to take the initiative and forge these kinds of networks and these sorts of cross-border collaborations in the absence of the STA?
Karen: When it comes to AI, I think there would still be collaboration that can happen, at least in the open science domain where we’re talking about, not IP, but things that are being shared publicly. The AI research community is very global in that there’s a lot of conferences that happen each year that are annual convenings in different disciplines within AI, and all of them are international. When you go to these conferences, it’s like 40% of participants there are from China. You’re either from the US or you’re from China, and then there’s like a smattering of Canadians and a smattering of Europeans, Britts. They’re constantly in communication is basically what I’m trying to say. They show up to these conferences, they exchange ideas, they’re presenting things.
These are researchers at companies that are presenting ideas that they’re willing to have in the public domain. Google researchers are talking with Baidu researchers and Amazon researchers talking with Tencent researchers, and they’re trading things that they think are not sensitive, like different algorithmic approaches to something like how to make a recommendation system better, which is open domain because you can’t really do anything with that until you use your own proprietary data to train that algorithm to make the recommendation system better. I think the collaboration will continue to happen, but the issue is, what we’re seeing now in these types of these international convenings is there are a lot of visa issues that are starting to arise, where if a conference is set in the U.S., it is more difficult now for certain international researchers to get visas in time to even participate. The same is starting to happen in Canada.
This is very concerning for the AI community. There’s been a really big debate within the AI community for how they can actually locate these conferences in places where they’re just more accessible. So, this year they located a conference in Rwanda because Rwanda does not bar anyone from coming to participate for visa reasons. I mean, there were other challenges for getting to Rwanda, but I was there, and there were tons of African researchers there, there were tons of Chinese researchers, tons of American researchers that were all just coming, like literally trying to find a place in the world where they could come together to continue to talk to one another. Debb would know this better than me, but I’m sure one of the ways that the organizers of these conferences have tried to mitigate this issue is by coordinating with governments to have special visa authorization processes for things like these conferences where there’s like a separate queue or a special pass where AI researchers get just approved more quickly so that they actually can common time to present their research and their findings. And perhaps the STA actually would be the scaffolding for some kind of dialogue for that.
Kaiser: Fast track. Yeah.
Debbi: I think that issue is so complicated. I do think it’s been worse for both Americans going to China and Chinese going to the U.S. that staffing fell off during COVID. So, I think some of it is logistics. I used to manage it for the groups that were actually going under the S&T Agreement, and it was incredibly cumbersome and took a long time. I think that when you’re talking about enormous conferences with huge numbers of people, that’s going to be hard. And it’s equally hard in China. Actually, it’s tougher, right? I went to several conferences in China this summer. You no longer get access onto the university grounds. You wind up getting escorted. Universities have now even built their conference centers to be sort of isolated in a separate part so they can bring conferees on without letting them onto the university campus. And so, I expected you would say somewhere like Singapore.
Karen: There was also a conference in Singapore. Yeah, it’s true.
Debbi: But I’m glad that there was one in Rwanda and you had more African scientists. I think that actually sounds like a plus. I think you’re going to see the failure to renew in two places. The first is government-to-government cooperation because it relies on the agreement. Now, the people arguing against this will say, “Well, but we can then negotiate separate agreements.” But those are going to be more difficult without the umbrella agreement because you’re going to have to renegotiate the IP pieces, you’re going to have to renegotiate all the stuff you already have. And you’re talking about, in an atmosphere of distrust and hostility, trying to get multiple agreements done, which sounds way tougher. I think it has a big effect on government-to-government. Of course, it’s going to have a bigger effect on the things that the U.S. wants more than the Chinese want.
And I think it’s also going to affect a lot of science that we’re not talking about, that isn’t sort of high-priority policy stuff for China, but is just some scientists who found they worked together really effectively. Maybe they went to grad school together or whatever, and they’re doing stuff that just isn’t a high priority for the Chinese government. I think that’s where you’ll see the hit. And that could affect all kinds of areas. I’ve met geologists who are working with geologists and biologists who are sampling things. There’s all this stuff that just isn’t top of mind for policymakers in either Washington or Beijing that could be badly affected by the loss of the agreement. Because what we haven’t yet said is the Chinese see the agreement as covering all science.
Not just government-to-government science. There’s language in the agreement that talks about universities, institutes, laboratories, etc. It’s facilitating language. It isn’t limiting language, but the Chinese see that as the core to facilitating the whole range of basic science work between the U.S. and China. And there’s also all kinds of social science stuff that we love to do that the Chinese have always felt less enthusiastic about.
Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Debbi: The economists who are trying to figure out how the Chinese economy is doing, the political scientists trying to figure out the resilience of the Chinese Communist Party, the sociologists trying to figure out what’s happening with the lying flat youth. All of that, I think, is at risk.
Kaiser: All right, I want to wrap up here with a couple quick questions. One is, well, are there ways in which the agreement should be enhanced or improved? I mean, we’ve made a good strong case against decoupling, but what about de-risking? Isn’t de-risking, that’s the new term of art after all, is there a six-month window enough to even think about making tweaks to it that Beijing will also buy?
Debbi: The way to de-risk is just by which sub-agreements you have under the agreement. It’s an umbrella. And then if there are things you don’t want to work on, don’t work on it. But I think there are things that could be added to the agreement that might be helpful. The first is just sort of a weird lack in the original agreement that I think reflects the nature of U.S. relations in the ’70s and ’80s. But the agreement doesn’t say it’s for peaceful purposes. And so I think they might want to add that, and I doubt that would be problematic.
Kaiser: You just reminded me that one of the things that John Holdren talked about was how, very early on, they used the agreement to talk about nuclear weapons controls. That was really interesting.
Debbi: Yeah. And there was a lot of stuff on making sure the Chinese had good nuclear security actually. If you’re going to have nuclear weapons, we want to make sure that they stay with you and don’t wind up in the hands of someone else. And so a lot of it was that. It wasn’t technology, it was security. But clearly, there’s no appetite for that anymore. I think saying that it’s for peaceful uses might make everybody happier. But the other thing I think is Chinese, especially the 2018 data law, I think, is a real problem for a lot of people working in China and accessing data. Actually, what we discovered when I was on this academic exchange that CSIS sponsored was that actually there’s some reciprocal data access issues now. It is hard to access a number of U.S. government websites from China. I suspect that’s because of whatever…
Kaiser: Geo-blocking. Yeah.
Debbi: … anti-hacking software they’re using or whatever. You know how all of your email from China winds up in your spam box? I suspect this is happening without any high-level decision, but it is actually a problem for Chinese social scientists who want to do the same kind of analysis of the US as we want to do of China, which we are all better off if we all do that. The more they understand us and our system, the better off and the safer we are. Right? So, it’s hard to access Chinese government websites from the U.S. It’s hard to access U.S. government websites from China. There’s also the problem of the CNKI and the loss of access to a bunch of databases in the last year. I think there are some things that could be added in terms of transparency and sort of openness that would be beneficial to everyone and are not so much about de-risking as enhancing science.
Kaiser: Very good. Very good. Karen, do you have a sense for what the likelihood is that this is going to be renewed after six months? And maybe adding onto that, why was the Biden administration so hesitant to simply renew it?
Karen: I have no idea. Debb might know this better. From my stance only, having talked with the scientists, everyone, all of the scientists feel extremely pessimistic, but I don’t think that really has any bearing on whether the renewal will happen or not.
Kaiser: Debb, are they just scared of that attack for being soft on China that might come from the Republicans because if they didn’t renew this, of course, there would be no such attack, right?
Debbi: I do think there’s concern about the political fallout. I also think that this confusion of basic science with sort of ready-for-market technology and the tendency in Washington to be talking probably to business people and not to scientists mean that I’m not sure they were really getting the full story of how the scientific community felt really until after Karen’s article came out. That article triggered so many people to suddenly call me up and say, “What are we going to do?” Including scientific groups. Some of the scientific groups had already reached out actually to the White House, but a lot more people got energized after The Wall Street Journal article. It was really interesting how influential it was.
Kaiser: Yay.
Karen: Oh, I’m really glad to hear that.
Kaiser: Yeah. It was fantastic. That is a happy note to wind up on. Congratulations, and thank you both for taking so much time out of your respective evenings and mornings to talk to me about this. Fantastic. Let’s move on to recommendations. Let me very quickly remind everyone first that we have our Next China conference, which will be November 2nd in New York. It’s just a fantastic event space on the East River in Midtown East near the UN. We have a great, great lineup of speakers. Last week’s guest, Yasheng Huang will be keynoting the conference. There’s going to be a series of interactive breakout sessions where there’s just bound to be a topic that you’re going to be keen to explore with our speakers. I’m really looking forward to this. I’m even going to host a game show, a kind of jeopardy-style game show. Just so that I don’t violate IP, I’m going to call it something like Peril! How’s that one?
That’ll work, right? I wouldn’t want to violate anybody’s IP. Anyway, I hope that many of you can make it. Get your tickets now. Just click on events from our page atthechinaproject.com. All right. Let’s move to recommendations. Debbi, why don’t you start off, what do you have for us?
Debbi: I have an article in The New Yorker by a guy named Peter Slevin, that’s called Abortion Opponents Are Targeting a Signature G.O.P. Public-Health Initiative.
Kaiser: A G.O.P. Public Health Initiative.
Debbi: Yes. This is President George W. Bush’s signature Global Initiative, the greatest public health initiative ever done by any country anywhere. This was PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief.
Kaiser: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Debbi: Which has saved tens of hundreds of thousands of people at this point by putting them on antiretrovirals. I think, at this point, I don’t know that people remember that prior to 2003, there was this attitude that, oh, people in developing countries, they can’t keep track of time. You’ll even see there’s a West Wing episode where they say this idiot stuff about they don’t have watches. How could they take these drugs? And just this attitude that there’s nothing we can do. And it was really Tony Fauci and some other folks at NIH, with Colin Powell, I think, who went to Bush and said, “Let’s do something.” And they put billions of dollars into this. It was renewed every year by the Obama administration. I guess it’s renewed in five year blocks. So, it was renewed by the Obama administration. It was even renewed by the Trump administration. They have always kept this initiative completely separate from global abortion politics. And now people in Congress have decided they want to mix global abortion politics with this thing.
Kaiser: Wait, how does this have any bearing on abortion?
Debbi: None of the money from PEPFAR goes anywhere near any abortions, but some of the health facilities that receive PEPFAR money also provide other women’s health services, which might include abortion. And so, they want to ban any health facility that even mentions abortion from receiving PEPFAR money. It would cut off a large, large percentage of the partners that have made PEPFAR so effective. I mean, imagine some of it is like government-run hospitals. They provide many services, right? Anyway, this whole thing is at risk because of really ridiculous stuff that will not affect abortion in any way. It wasn’t like George W. Bush was this big fan of abortion and we were under the Mexico City rule back then. And yet, this program was able to be run, to be effective, to really lead the world in thinking about how you could really deliver health services in fairly deprived areas.
It’s actually the case that PEPFAR even came to China and the CDC, Global AIDS Program, and USAID were both active in China. CDC-GAP was very much involved in helping China develop their original AIDS treatment program, which was called China Cares.
Kaiser: Oh, I remember.
Debbi: Where the insight, which really was from both the U.S. and China CDC together, that the only way you were going to get people to come and get tested was if they thought they had a hope of treatment. Otherwise, why would you bother to get tested? And of course, knowing your status is very important for not transmitting onward to others, right? As we’ve all learned during COVID.
Kaiser: Debbi, we have to impose our rule now about only one terribly misguided effort to derail a benign policy that we could complain about at a time per show. So, we already had our quotient, and that’s great, though. I mean, nobody’s going to read the article because they can just listen to you talk about it, but PEPFAR article, what’s his name?
Debbi: Peter Slevin in The New Yorker.
Kaiser: Peter in The New Yorker.
Debbi: It’s a very short article, but he does a very good job, and he talks more about Africa, which is the main place where PEPFAR works.
Kaiser: Fantastic. Great recommendation. Alright, Karen, are you ready with one?
Karen: I am. My recommendation is the book — Power and Progress — which I’m reading right now by two MIT professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. This book looks at the last 1,000 years of human history and basically reexamines the relationship between technology and progress.
Kaiser: Oh, wow.
Karen: Basically, there’s such a deeply ingrained belief, I think, within our society, especially now with the U.S.-China competition, that technology is equal to progress. Like, if you advance technology, you will get human progress. The book really digs into how that has actually not been true for the vast majority of the last thousand years, where technology is very much shaped by the people who have the money to develop it. It usually, first, benefits the people at the top, the elites at the extent of the people at the bottom. And it’s only through really drastic things like the Black Plague that really shift power dynamics and redistribute the wealth of these technologies to other people. Anyway, it is such a fascinating read. It’s one of like 10 books that I have stuck on my desk right now that I’m supposed to get through, but I would just highly recommend that one.
Kaiser: Oh, fantastic. That sounds great. Actually, I’m definitely going to read that. That’s right up my alley. All right. I have a recommendation. I think it’s probably, as always, for something much more frivolous. Mine is for the Chinese TV serial King’s War which is on Netflix. The Chinese name is Chu Han Chuan Qi. It’s got one of my favorite actors in it, Chen Daoming. I don’t know if you know this guy, but I love him. He’s just an amazing actor. Also a bunch of other fine Chinese thespians in this production. It tells one of the truly great stories out of Chinese history, the story of the fall of the Qing dynasty and the rise of these rebellions, the Dazexiang Uprising 大泽乡起义 (Dàzéxiāng Qǐyì), all the rebellions in that interregnum after 209 to about 206.
Then out of this chaos emerges these two unbelievable characters. They’re both really compelling and they’re complicated. I mean, these are not black-and-white figures. There’s not a good guy and a bad guy. Of course, Liu Bang, who’s the kind of salt of the earth peasant-born guy, he’s like a minor law enforcement officer in a little village, he ends up founding the Han Dynasty, but to get there, he has to best the hegemon of Chu, Chu Bà Wáng 霸王, amazing Xiao Yu], who is such a kind of heroic, larger-than-life character. Anyway, I just like that they’re both likable and also just sort of detestable in equal measure. It turns out that moral ambiguity wasn’t something that American Premium cable shows came up with. It’s been there all along. But it’s good. The production’s really good. It’s super, super long.
I’m on episode 40 right now and there’s like 85 episodes or something like that, but it’s just great. Check it out. It’s subtitled pretty decently in English on Netflix, so I highly recommend it. All right, Karen, Debb—thank you so much.
Debbi: Thank you.
Karen: Thank you so much, Kaiser,
Kaiser: What a pleasure to speak to you both. I look forward to having you both on the show again soon. Karen, tell us really quickly, where are you off to now? You’ve left the journal and you will begin writing for who?
Karen: I will become a contributing writer for The Atlantic.
Kaiser: Oh, fantastic.
Karen: I’m very excited for that.
Kaiser: Can you pass on my compliments to Ed Yong?
Karen: He just left.
Kaiser: He did? Oh my God. Are you going to take his spot?
Karen: No, those are massive shoes to fill, so no. I don’t want that spot.
Kaiser: Okay. I mean, if anyone could, right? Yeah, he is absolutely great. Where’s he going? I wonder.
Karen: I think he’s going to work on documentaries.
Kaiser: Hey, I have a documentary coming out, by the way, a NOVA documentary on science and technology in China. It’s technology, it’s not really science. They originally were going to do two films, but we couldn’t get much China access because it all collapsed around the Pelosi visit, but look for it this fall. It’ll be pretty good.
Karen: That’s awesome.
Debbi: Fantastic.
Karen: Very excited to see that.
Kaiser: You’ll recognize a ton of the people who I interviewed for it, though. Thank you once again for joining me and what a pleasure this has been.
Karen: Thank you so much.
Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and review at Apple Podcasts as that really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Xitter, as it’s now called, or on Facebook, or on any of the other renowned socials at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows on the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.