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 in China. 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.