US tensions with China are fraying long-cultivated academic ties. Will the chill hurt US interests?
WASHINGTON — In the 1980s, Fu Xiangdong was a young Chinese virology student who came to the United States to study biochemistry. More than thirty years later, he had a prestigious professorship in California and conducted promising research into Parkinson's disease.
But now Fu is doing his research at a Chinese university. His American career was derailed when US-China relations collapsed, putting his partnership with a Chinese university under scrutiny. He eventually resigned.
Fu's story reflects the rise and fall of academic engagement between the US and China.
From 1978 onwards, this cooperation expanded for decades, largely insulated from the fluctuations in relations between the two countries. Today the situation is in decline, with Washington viewing Beijing as a strategic rival and fears of Chinese espionage growing. The number of Chinese students in the United States has fallen and research cooperation between the US and China is declining. Academics shy away from potential Chinese projects for fear that seemingly small missteps could end their careers.
This decline does not only affect students and researchers. Analysts say this will undermine American competitiveness and weaken global efforts to tackle health problems. Previous collaborations have led to significant progress, including in flu surveillance and vaccine development.
“That has been really damaging to American science,” said Deborah Seligsohn, a former American diplomat in Beijing and now a political scientist at Villanova University. “We are producing less science because of this decline.”
For some, given increased tensions between the US and China, the prospect of scientific progress must take a back seat to security concerns. According to them, such cooperation helps China by giving it access to sensitive commercial, defense and technological information. They also fear that the Chinese government is using its presence at American universities to monitor and harass dissidents.
These concerns were at the heart of the China Initiative, a program launched in 2018 by the Justice Department under the Trump administration to uncover acts of economic espionage. Although it failed to catch spies, the effort did have an impact on researchers in American schools.
Following this initiative, Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was charged in 2021 with concealing ties to the Chinese government. Prosecutors eventually dropped all charges, but Chen lost his investigative group. He said his family has been through a difficult time and is still recovering.
Chen said investigations and wrongful prosecutions like his “push out talent.”
“That will hurt America's scientific industry and hurt American competitiveness,” he said.
The Biden administration ended the China Initiative in 2022, but other efforts are targeting scientists with Chinese connections.
In Florida, a state law aimed at curbing foreign influence has raised concerns that students from China could effectively be barred from the labs of the state's public universities.
This month, a group of Republican senators raised concerns about Beijing's influence on U.S. campuses through student groups and urged the Justice Department to determine whether such groups should be registered as foreign agents.
Miles Yu, director of the Hudson Institute's China Center, said Beijing has exploited American higher education and research institutions to modernize its economy and military.
“For quite some time now, for cultural, self-interested reasons, many people have dual loyalties and mistakenly think that it is okay to serve the interests of both the US and China,” Yu said.
The US-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement – the first major pact between the two countries, signed in 1979 – was set to expire this year. In August, Congress extended the agreement for six months, but its future is also at stake.
If there is a new agreement, it must take into account new developments in science and technology, Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, said recently.
There were only 700 American students studying in China, Burns said, compared to nearly 300,000 Chinese students in the U.S., down from a peak of about 372,000 in 2019-2020.
By October, nearly all Confucius Institutes, a Beijing-backed program for Chinese language and culture, on American college campuses were closed. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, their numbers have fallen from about 100 in 2019 to fewer than five now.
The National Institute of Health launched an investigation into foreign ties in 2018 by asking dozens of U.S. institutions to investigate whether their faculty members may have violated policies regarding the use of federal money, mostly in cases of partnerships with Chinese institutions.
In the case of Fu, then a professor at the University of California, San Diego, his ties to Wuhan University were the focus of the NIH investigation. Fu insisted that federal money was never used to work there, according to local news station La Jolla Light, but the university ruled against him.
In a China Initiative case, Charles Lieber, a former professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, was found guilty in December 2021 of lying to the federal government about his ties to a Chinese university and a Chinese government talent recruitment program.
Chen, the MIT professor, said once-encouraged collaborations suddenly became problematic. Disclosure rules were unclear and in many cases such collaborations were praised, he said.
“Very few people in the general public understand that most American universities, including MIT, do not conduct secret research projects on campus,” Chen said. “We aim to publish our research results.”
The investigations have had negative impacts on college campuses. “People are so afraid that if you check the wrong box, you could be accused of lying to the government,” Chen said.
In June, an academic study published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said the China Initiative has likely caused widespread fear and anxiety among scientists of Chinese descent.
The survey, which surveyed 1,304 scientists of Chinese descent working at U.S. universities, found that many were considering leaving the U.S. or no longer applying for federal grants, the researchers wrote.
An analysis of research papers in the PubMed database found that as of 2021, US scientists still wrote more papers with scientists from China than from any other country, but those with a history of collaboration with China experienced a decline in research productivity after 2019, shortly after the NIH study started.
The study, which will be published in the journal PNAS by the end of the year, shows that the impact of US-based scientists working with China, as measured by citations, has fallen by 10%.
“It has a chilling effect on science,” Ruixue Jia, the study's lead investigator, said of the NIH study. “While researchers tried to complete existing collaborative projects, they were unwilling to start new ones, and the results could get worse. Both countries are affected.”
Three months after Fu resigned from the California school, his name appeared on the website of Westlake University, a private research university in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. At Westlake, Fu leads a laboratory to tackle problems in RNA biology and regenerative medicine.
In August, Fu was joined by Guan Kunliang, a fellow scientist in San Diego, who was also investigated. Guan was banned from applying for NIH grants for two years. Guan didn't lose his job, but his laboratory had shrunk. Now he's rebuilding a molecular cell biology laboratory in Westlake.
Li Chenjian, former vice provost of Beijing University, said the loss of talent for China is a complicated issue and concerns may be exaggerated because the US is still the favorite place for the world's brightest minds and has a has an abundance of talent.
According to the National Science Foundation, more than 87% of Chinese students who received their PhDs in the US from 2005 to 2015 planned to stay in the US. The rate fell to 73.9 in 2021, but rose to 76.7 in 2022, above the average of 74.3% for all foreign students who completed a research doctorate in the US
Rao Yi, a prominent neurobiologist who returned to China from the US in 2007, said US policy on the China Initiative was “morally wrong.”
“We will see how long it will take for the US government and its morally upright scientists to correct such mistakes and see the bigger picture of human development, beyond pettiness and short-sightedness,” he said. “Throughout history, it has always been morally corrupt governments that advocate blocking scientific communications and persecuting scientists.”
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Associated Press writers Christina Larson and Collin Binkley contributed to this report