Political challenges seen as threat to fruitful collaboration, exchanges
Experts from China and the United States have warned that scientific communities in both nations and around the world would face significant uncertainty if the China-US Science and Technology Agreement fails to survive the current difficulties in bilateral relations.
They are calling for scientists from the two countries to push for the renewal of the agreement for the benefit of all humanity.
In late August, just before the renewal deadline, Washington made a last-minute decision to temporarily extend the agreement by six months.
"This short-term, six-month extension will keep the agreement in force while we seek authority to undertake negotiations to amend and strengthen the terms of the STA," a US State Department official told Reuters at the time. "It does not commit the US to a longer-term extension."
Xue Lan, a professor and dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University, said the long-term continuation of the agreement is of great importance, because without such a framework, "all bilateral scientific and technological cooperation would be put in a very difficult position".
"Without the agreement, there would definitely not be a basis for cooperation between the two sides," he said.
The landmark agreement, signed in 1979 by then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and then US president Jimmy Carter, was one of the first shoots of cooperation after the countries normalized diplomatic relations that year. It has generally been renewed about every five years since, with the most recent renewal in 2018.
In a summary of bilateral science and technology exchanges, the Chinese embassy in the US said the agreement has provided a legal framework for governmental cooperation and an effective platform for civilian cooperation.
The agreement's original text, released by the Foreign Ministry, set out the basic principles for science and technology cooperation and exchanges between the two governments. It also encouraged governments, universities and research institutions of the two countries to cooperate in areas including agriculture, energy, health, the environment, education and academic exchanges.
Cooperation under the agreement has included exchanging scientific information, sending scholars and students to each other's country, conducting joint research experiments, and collaborating on project planning and research outcome exchanges.
Xue said the scientific communities in China and the US had initiated a series of exchange visits in the 1970s, before the agreement was signed, that had laid the foundation for cooperation in science and technology when they established diplomatic relations.
More than four decades later, the agreement is facing unprecedented political challenges.
In late June, a letter from 10 Republican lawmakers urged US Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to renew the agreement, arguing that Beijing would seek to use it to strengthen its military and undermine US sovereignty.
Yuan Zheng, deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of American Studies, said that argument was "groundless", because the US had been wary of China from the very beginning and no cooperation with China under the agreement had ever involved the US' most advanced technologies, including ones with military applications.
He said bilateral cooperation on science and technology had always been two-way, voluntary and based on the premise of mutual benefit.
Scientific relations between the US and China have worsened since 2018, when the administration of then US president Donald Trump launched the "China Initiative" to target researchers with Chinese ties.
The now-defunct program, which resulted in some high-profile false arrests and prosecutions, cast a shadow over scientific collaborations and prompted many scientists of Chinese origin to leave the US for other countries.
In an article published in Foreign Affairs magazine in mid-September, former Massachusetts Institute of Technology president L. Rafael Reif cited a recent survey of Chinese American university scientists sponsored by the Asian American Scholar Forum, which found that 65 percent of respondents were worried about collaborations with China.
The number of research papers co-authored by US and Chinese scientists fell in 2021 for the first time in three decades, according to statistics released by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
Yuan said that was an indication of the chilling effect caused by the China Initiative and neo-McCarthyism in the US, which made many US scientists, especially Chinese American scientists, afraid to cooperate with Chinese colleagues.
The US also introduced a series of sanctions or legislative bills targeting Chinese scientific institutions or technology enterprises in recent years, further chilling Sino-US scientific and technological cooperation, Yuan said.
An international cooperation officer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who requested anonymity, said a decoupling of science and technology would do serious harm to scientists and science itself.
"Most scientific research can't be done behind closed doors, and no country is able to stay ahead (in any one field) forever," the officer said.
Alan Jeffrey Giacomin, editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Physics of Fluids, said international collaboration could produce unique results.
He said the journal was an example of the fruit of cooperation, with its 15-person editing team including two associate editors from Beijing — Professor Xu Chunxiao from Tsinghua University and Professor Yao Zhaohui from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"I chose these two associate editors because they're the best choices for Physics of Fluids and they have played a crucial role," Giacomin said. "They edit papers not regionally, not just from China, but from all over the world. Their reputations are worldwide."
Reif, the former MIT president, said that allowing international talent, including Chinese students, to study in the US was "overwhelmingly beneficial" to the country, with 90 percent of science, technology, engineering and mathematics students from China who had earned doctoral degrees in the US between 2000 and 2015 still in the US in 2017, "helping the country advance".
China has been the largest source country of international students in the US since 2008, with about 290,000 students studying in the country in the 2021-22 academic year, according to a white paper released by the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization.
John Holdren, who was a science adviser to former US president Barack Obama and is currently a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Foreign Policy that "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".
"A lot of the interactions wouldn't happen," he said.
Xue, the Tsinghua University professor, urged the scientific communities of both countries to work together to minimize the impact of geopolitics on science and technology cooperation and promote the renewal of the agreement.
"This is the common aspiration and also the shared responsibility of the scientific communities in China and the US," he said.