President Joe Biden’s administration has given itself 6 months to reach a deal with China to preserve a 44-year-old agreement governing scientific cooperation between the two superpowers. But the rising tensions between the two countries and calls by congressional Republicans for the United States to end cooperation with China will require the White House to walk a political tightrope in renewing what has traditionally been a garden-variety diplomatic pact.
U.S. academics welcome the administration’s decision, first reported by NBC News, not to abandon an agreement that has been renewed in 5-year increments by both Republican and Democratic presidents since then–Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping and U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed it in 1979. They argue the U.S. has benefited as much as China in conducting joint basic research on topics ranging from reducing infant mortality to combating climate change. There’s no reason to abandon those efforts, they add.
“I’m delighted by this result,” says physicist John Holdren of Harvard University, who served as the science adviser to former President Barack Obama. In 2011, Holdren helped negotiate a 5-year extension of the Agreement Between the United States and China on Cooperation in Science and Technology, also known as the STA. The pact “says that it’s OK with the U.S. government that we collaborate on science and technology with China, with appropriate selectivity and management. I think it is particularly important, at a time of tension in so many dimensions of our relationship with China, that we show that there are things worth preserving in that relationship.”
But critics of the existing STA, which was scheduled to expire on 27 August, believe that is a dangerously naïve view of China, which they say poses a major threat to U.S. economic and national security. They say the world has changed dramatically since 1979, when China was emerging from its decadelong Cultural Revolution and was eager to learn from the West, and that the current regime has no interest in two-way collaborations.
“Preserving an open-ended declaration of scientific and technological collaboration with Beijing seems profoundly counterproductive when considering how the fields of greatest mutual interest are also dual-use by nature, ripe for diversion to totalitarian and military ends by the Chinese Communist Party’s civil-military fusion strategy,” says business executive Michael Kratsios, who helped negotiate the latest 5-year extension of the agreement in 2018 as a senior White House science and technology official under former President Donald Trump. “The STA’s expiration will help refocus our cutting-edge R&D investments into venues where they are far less vulnerable to being used against the U.S. national interest.”
The 6-month extension gives the United States the flexibility “to undertake negotiations [with China] to amend and strengthen the terms” of the STA, according to a spokesperson for the Department of State. “It does not commit the United States to a longer term extension. We are clear-eyed to the challenges posed by the PRC’s [Peoples Republic of China’s] national strategies on science and technology, Beijing’s actions in this space, and the threat they pose to U.S. national security and intellectual property and are dedicated to protecting the interests of the American people.”
The Chinese government welcomes an opportunity to discuss extending the agreement, says a spokesperson at its embassy in Washington, D.C. “As two major R&D countries, China and the United States should maintain contact and exchanges in S&T,” says Liu Pengyu in a statement to ScienceInsider. “The more than 40-year history of China-U.S. scientific and technological cooperation has fully proved that China-U.S. exchanges and cooperation are mutually beneficial and have improved the well-being of the people of the two countries and the world at large.”
The STA doesn’t provide funding for any joint project, nor does it mandate that the two countries work together in any particular area. But over the decades it has served as a mechanism to foster collaboration across many fields between U.S. and Chinese agencies, universities, national laboratories, and private companies. Those joint projects include a landmark clinical study showing how folic acid can prevent birth defects and a network of clean energy research centers aimed at reducing carbon emissions from buildings, vehicles, and power plants.
None of those projects has involved sensitive or classified research. But even fundamental research discoveries can help the Chinese government gain an advantage over the U.S., asserted the chair of the House of Representatives’s Select Committee on China in a 27 June letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken that urged him to end the agreement.
“The evidence available suggests that the PRC will continue to look for opportunities to exploit partnerships organized under the STA to advance its military objectives,” wrote Representative Mike Gallagher (R–WI) and nine of his Republican colleagues. “The United States must stop fueling its own destruction.”
Supporters of extending the STA view such criticism as “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” A better approach, says Sudip Parikh, CEO of AAAS (which publishes ScienceInsider), is to examine what changes are needed. A 6-month extension gives both sides a chance to hash out any problems without abandoning the agreement.
“I’d like to see language relating to greater transparency and data sharing,” Parikh says, citing the potential value of pooling health or environmental data collected by each country. “Reciprocity has not always been a hallmark of China’s scientific enterprise.”
On the Chinese side, “I think the extension is a step in the right direction,” says Huiyao Wang, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank that focuses on international relations. For China, the STA holds symbolic significance, being the first agreement between the two countries after they normalized diplomatic relations.
The U.S. has benefited from the arrangement, says Wang, who notes that the STA opened the door for Chinese-U.S. student exchanges. Of those Chinese students who earned a U.S. Ph.D. in a science field, 80% or more remained in the country at least temporarily, he says. That flow of talent “supported universities and R&D in the U.S.,” Wang says. The isolated problems that have arisen shouldn’t tarnish “the great progress this agreement has provided for both countries.”
Wang, who previously served as an adviser to China’s State Council, the equivalent of the U.S. cabinet, believes China is open to renegotiating the pact. “If the U.S. is thinking about improving and strengthening this agreement, I don’t see why not.” But if the objective is scaling down or adding inequitable clauses, “that could be a problem.”
Ultimately, Wang says it would be “devastating for the world” if its two largest economies can’t cooperate on global scientific challenges.
The U.S. has bilateral research agreements with some 60 countries, and the STA with China has been renewed in the past with little fanfare. But in recent years scientific collaboration with China has become increasingly suspect in the eyes of many conservative politicians.
The Trump administration’s China Initiative to root out Chinese espionage cast a pall over once-flourishing collaborations between U.S. academics and their Chinese counterparts. The Biden administration has apparently bent to that pressure by declining to launch any new government-to-government initiatives under the STA umbrella.
Renewing the STA will reinvigorate such efforts, Holdren predicts. But he guesses that extending the agreement wasn’t an easy decision for the Biden administration.
“It’s not just Republicans who worry about the downsides of collaboration with China,” he says. “And you can be pretty sure there were some vigorous arguments inside the administration. But we’re past that now, and the administration is sending a clear signal that it wants to move ahead with new types of collaboration.”
Areas ripe for collaboration, Holdren says, include efforts to prevent future pandemics, improve nuclear reactor safety, and better monitor seismic and earthquake activity.
