WASHINGTON — The U.S. Fu Xiangdong was a Chinese virology student who moved to the United States to study biochemistry in the 1980s. He held a distinguished post in California and was pursuing promising Parkinson’s disease research more than three decades later.

On the other hand, Fu is now conducting research at a Chinese institution. His American career was ruined as US-China ties deteriorated, casting doubt on his cooperation with a Chinese university. He eventually resigned.

Fu’s narrative parallels the growth and fall of intellectual engagement between the United States and China.

Beginning in 1978, such cooperation grew for decades, virtually immune to variations in the two countries’ relations. It is now in decline, with Washington considering Beijing a strategic adversary and mounting concerns about Chinese surveillance. The number of Chinese students in the United States is declining, and collaboration between the United States and China in research is dwindling. Academics are avoiding possible China projects out of worry that seemingly little mistakes could jeopardize their careers.

US Tensions With China Are Fraying Long-Cultivated Academic Ties

This decline is affecting more than just students and researchers. Analysts say it will reduce American competitiveness and hamper global efforts to solve health challenges. Collaborations in the past have resulted in substantial improvements, such as in influenza surveillance and vaccine development.

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

Given the heightened US-China relations, some believe the promise of scientific achievements must take a back seat to security concerns. According to them, such cooperation benefits China by providing it with crucial economic, defence, and technological information. They also believe the Chinese government is monitoring and harassing dissidents in American institutions.

These concerns were central to the Justice Department’s China Initiative, a program launched in 2018 by the Trump administration to discover acts of economic espionage. While the effort did not result in the capture of spies, it did impact researchers in American schools.

Gang Chen, a mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was charged in 2021 under the program with concealing ties to the Chinese government. Prosecutors later dropped all accusations, but Chen’s research group was disbanded. He stated that his family had a difficult experience and is still recovering.

Chen stated that inquiries and unfair 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 stopped the China Initiative in 2022, but other initiatives are aimed at Chinese-connected researchers.

In Florida, a state rule aimed at reducing foreign influences has sparked fears that Chinese students may be essentially barred from labs at the state’s public colleges.

This month, a bipartisan group of Republican senators raised worry about Beijing’s influence on American campuses through student groups, urging the Justice Department to investigate whether such groups should be registered as foreign agents.

US Tensions With China Are Fraying Long-Cultivated Academic Ties

According to Miles Yu, director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center, Beijing has used American 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,” he said.

The United States-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement, signed in 1979, was slated to expire this year. Congress extended the pact by six months in August, but its future remains to be determined.

According to Nicholas Burns, the United States ‘ ambassador to China, if a new agreement is reached, it should consider new scientific and technological breakthroughs.

According to Burns, just 700 American students were studying in China, compared to almost 300,000 Chinese students in the United States, down from a peak of around 372,000 in 2019-2020.

On American university campuses, practically all Confucius Institutes, a Beijing-backed Chinese language and culture program, had dissolved by October. According to the US Government Accountability Office, their number has decreased from around 100 in 2019 to fewer than five.

In 2018, the National Institute of Health launched an investigation into foreign links by requesting that hundreds of American schools investigate if their faculty members may have broken laws governing the use of government funds, typically in situations involving cooperation with Chinese institutions.

The NIH probe focused on Fu, who was then a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and his connections with Wuhan University. According to the local news outlet La Jolla Light, Fu argued that federal funds were never used for work there, but the university decided against him.

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

US Tensions With China Are Fraying Long-Cultivated Academic Ties

According to Chen, collaborations that were once welcomed have suddenly become challenging. He claimed that disclosure standards had been unclear and that such collaborations had been praised in many situations.

“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.”

University campuses have suffered as a result of the probes. “People are so fearful that, if you check the wrong box, you could be accused of lying to the government,” Chen said.

According to a peer-reviewed academic study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal in June, the China Initiative has undoubtedly produced widespread fear and anxiety among scientists of Chinese heritage.

The study, which polled 1,304 scientists of Chinese heritage working at American colleges, found that many were considering leaving the country or ceasing to seek federal funds, according to the researchers.

An analysis of research papers in the PubMed database revealed that, as of 2021, U.S. scientists still co-wrote more papers with Chinese scientists than with scientists from any other country, but those with a history of collaborating with China saw a decline in research productivity after 2019, shortly after the NIH investigation began.

The study’s findings, which will appear in the PNAS journal before the end of the year, indicate that the impact of US-based academics collaborating with China has decreased by 10%.

US Tensions With China Are Fraying Long-Cultivated Academic Ties

“It has a chilling effect on science,” said Ruixue Jia, the NIH investigation’s main researcher. “While researchers worked to complete existing collaborative projects, they were hesitant to start new ones, and the results could worsen.” Both countries have suffered.”

Fu’s name surfaced on the website of Westlake University, a private research university in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, three months after he resigned from the California school. Fu directs a lab at Westlake that studies RNA biology and regenerative medicine.

Guan Kunliang, a fellow scientist in San Diego who was being probed, joined Fu in August. Guan has been barred from applying for NIH grants for the next two years. Guan’s job was recovered, but his lab had downsized. He is now re-establishing a molecular cell biology lab at Westlake.

According to Li Chenjian, a former vice provost of Peking University, talent loss to China is a tricky issue, and the concern may be overstated because the United States remains the go-to spot for the world’s greatest minds and has abundant talent.

According to the National Science Foundation, from 2005 to 2015, more than 87% of Chinese students who got doctorates in the United States intended to stay in the country. The percentage dipped to 73.9 in 2021 but increased to 76.7 in 2022, exceeding the 74.3% average for all foreign students who received research doctorates in the United States.

Rao Yi, a distinguished neurobiologist who returned to China from the United States in 2007, stated that American actions about the China Initiative were “morally wrong.”

“We will see how long it will take for the U.S. government and its morally upright scientists to correct such mistakes and come around to see the bigger picture of human development, beyond petty-mindedness and shortsightedness,” he said. “Throughout history, it is always the morally corrupt governments which advocate the blocking of scientific communication and persecution of scientists.”

SOURCE – (AP)