New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)

US tensions with China are fraying long-cultivated academic ties

WASHINGTON — In the 1980s, Fu Xiangdong was a young Chinese virology student who came to the United States to study biochemist­ry. More than three decades later, he had a prestigiou­s professors­hip in California and was conducting promising research on Parkinson’s disease.

But now Fu is doing his research at a Chinese university. His American career was derailed as U.S.China relations unraveled, putting his collaborat­ions with a Chinese university under scrutiny. He ended up resigning.

Fu’s story mirrors the rise and fall of U.S.-China academic engagement.

Beginning in 1978, such cooperatio­n expanded for decades, largely insulated from the fluctuatio­ns in relations between the two countries. Today, it’s in decline, with Washington viewing Beijing as a strategic rival and there are growing fears about Chinese spying. The number of Chinese students in the United States is down, and U.S.-Chinese research collaborat­ion is shrinking. Academics are shying away from potential China projects over fears that seemingly minor missteps could end their careers.

This decline isn’t hurting just students and researcher­s. Analysts say it will undercut American competitiv­eness and weaken global efforts to address health issues. Previous collaborat­ions have led to significan­t advances, including in influenza surveillan­ce and vaccine developmen­t.

“That’s been really harmful to U.S. science,” said Deborah Seligsohn, a former U.S. diplomat in Beijing and now a political scientist at Villanova University. “We are producing less science because of this falloff.”

For some, given the heightened U.S.-China tensions, the prospect for scientific advances needs to take a back seat to security concerns. In their view, such cooperatio­n aids China by giving it access to sensitive commercial, defense and technologi­cal informatio­n. They also fear the Chinese government is using its presence in American universiti­es to monitor and harass dissidents.

Those concerns were at the core of the China Initiative, a program begun in 2018 by the Justice Department under the Trump administra­tion to uncover acts of economic espionage. While it failed to catch any spies, the effort did have an impact on researcher­s in American schools.

Under the initiative, Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineerin­g at the Massachuse­tts Institute of Technology, was charged in 2021 with hiding links with the Chinese government. Prosecutor­s eventually dropped all charges, but Chen lost his research group. He said his family went through a hard time and has yet to recover.

Chen said investigat­ions and wrongful prosecutio­ns like his “are pushing out talents.”

“That’s going to hurt U.S. scientific enterprise, hurt U.S. competitiv­eness,” he said.

The Biden administra­tion ended the China Initiative in 2022, but there are other efforts targeting scholars with Chinese connection­s.

In Florida, a state law aimed at curbing influences from foreign countries has raised concerns that students from China could effectivel­y be banned from labs at the state’s public universiti­es.

This month, a group of Republican senators expressed concerns about Beijing’s influence on American 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 China Center at Hudson Institute, said Beijing has exploited U.S. higher education and research institutes to modernize its economy and military.

“For some time, out of cultural, self-interest reasons, many people have double loyalty, erroneousl­y thinking it’s OK to serve the interests of both the U.S. and China,” Yu said.

The U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperatio­n Agreement — the first major pact between the two countries, signed in 1979 — was set to lapse this year. In August, Congress extended the agreement by six months, but its future also hangs in the balance.

If there is a new agreement, it should take into account new advances in science and technology, Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, said recently.

There were only 700 American students studying in China, Burns said, compared with nearly 300,000 Chinese students in the U.S., which is down from a peak of about 372,000 in 2019-2020.

By October, nearly all Confucius Institutes, a Beijing-backed Chinese language and culture program, had closed on American university campuses. Their number fell from about 100 in 2019 to fewer than five now, according to the U.S. Government Accountabi­lity Office.

The National Institute of Health in 2018 began an investigat­ion into foreign ties by asking dozens of American institutio­ns to look into whether their faculty members might have violated policies regarding use of federal money, usually in cases involving partnershi­ps with Chinese institutio­ns.

In the case of Fu, then a professor at the University of California, San Diego, his links with Wuhan University were the focus of the NIH investigat­ion. Fu insisted that federal money was never used toward work there, according to the local news outlet La Jolla Light, but the university ruled against him.

In a China Initiative case, Charles Lieber, a former chair of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, was found guilty in December 2021 of lying to the federal government about his affiliatio­ns with a Chinese university and a Chinese government talent-recruitmen­t program.

Chen, the MIT professor, said once-encouraged collaborat­ions suddenly became problemati­c. Disclosure rules had been unclear, and in many cases such collaborat­ions had been commended, he said.

“Very few people in the general public understand that most U.S. universiti­es, including MIT, don’t take on any secret research projects on campus,” Chen said. “We aim to publish our research findings.”