The Science Split?, The Wire China, Aug. 20, 2023.
By Eliot Chen
Can the U.S. and China still cooperate on the most basic science?
Later this month, one of the oldest bilateral agreements between the U.S. and China is set to expire. Signed in 1979, in the same month that the U.S. and China normalized diplomatic relations, the Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology has paved the way for four decades of research collaboration between the two countries. U.S. President Jimmy Carter called it part of an “irreversible course” in Chinese‐American relations. His successor, President Ronald Reagan, called it “a cornerstone in our expanding relationship.” The agreement has long been viewed as a bare minimum for engagement — the simplest contours to facilitate cooperation on matters that transcend politics, from public health to climate change.
But Carter and Reagan couldn’t foretell the current nadir in U.S.-China relations, which threatens to finally reverse course and let the agreement — known as the STA — expire.
“In 1979, there was an enormous asymmetry of capabilities [between the U.S. and China],” says Richard Suttmeier, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon, where his research focused on science and tech in U.S.-China relations. “Each subsequent renewal [of the STA] bore this aspect of asymmetry, with the U.S. being the dominant science and tech power. But today we have a very different situation.”
Whether or not China has “caught up” to the U.S. in science and technology remains hotly debated, but Washington has grown increasingly wary, first on commercial grounds, and more recently on national security grounds, that America might be aiding China’s growing technological capabilities to its own detriment. The topic of science and tech cooperation has thus emerged, practically overnight, as a third rail.
As relations between the U.S. and China have soured, the amount of joint research from the two countries has declined dramatically. Between 2019 and 2021, federal government spending on ‘assistance’ programs within China — including science and technology research funding — fell almost 90 percent to a paltry $7 million, according to an Office of Management and Budget study. That coincided with a marked decline in the research output by American scientists who collaborate with Chinese co-researchers, according to a recent study from the University of California, San Diego.
There’s this real concern about engaging with China because of a lack of understanding about what is sensitive and what isn’t, and the easiest strategy is to do nothing.
By comparison, the OMB assessment calculated that spending on non-defense “strategic competition” activities over the same period had risen to almost $10 billion.
The contrast is stark, notes Joanna Lewis, director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs program at Georgetown University — and it affects almost every part of the U.S. federal government.
“Previously, there was so much bilateral cooperation happening across almost every U.S. agency,” she says. “Now we’re in this opposite environment. There’s this real concern about engaging with China because of a lack of understanding about what is sensitive and what isn’t, and the easiest strategy is to do nothing.”
Indeed, renewing the 1979 STA, as every administration since Carter’s has done, has become politically controversial. Despite the STA’s long list of accomplishments — including a landmark study on the importance of folic acid supplements that helped prevent millions of stillbirths or birth defects, and long-standing bilateral cooperation on influenza research that has helped U.S. scientists develop the annual flu vaccine — some of China’s harshest critics in Washington argue the agreement isn’t worth saving. In June, a group of House Republicans, including GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik and Mike Gallagher, chair of the House Select Committee on the CCP, published a letter calling on the Biden administration to let it expire.
“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 to the greatest extent possible and, in some cases, to attempt to undermine American sovereignty,” says the letter, which was signed by 10 representatives in total. “The United States must stop fueling its own destruction. Letting the STA expire is a good first step.”
This week, Senator Rick Scott, from Florida, sent his own letter, saying “cooperation with a nation so contrary to American values is untenable. Instances of intellectual property theft, economic coercion, and human rights abuses underscore the need for the U.S. to reevaluate its engagement with the Communist Chinese Government and prioritize collaborations that align with our values and long-term interests.”
Defenders say that allowing the agreement to expire would inflict immense damage on the already precarious U.S.-China relationship. They argue that the oldest bilateral agreement between the U.S. and China has practical, as well as symbolic, importance: renewing it makes cooperation possible without committing the U.S. to anything concrete, while ending it sends a dangerous signal.
“Extending is actually the easy solution, because extending it doesn’t commit us to anything,” says Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. “The agreement itself is a broad umbrella agreement, and the Chinese see it as the enabler of all scientific cooperation.” Ending it, she adds, would be like “cutting off our nose to spite our face.”
The State Department, ultimately, is responsible for whether or not the agreement is renewed before the August 27th deadline. A department spokesperson told The Wire it does not comment on international negotiations or internal deliberations. Privately, academics and former officials involved in this area fret that the U.S. may let the agreement expire, citing a perceived lack of engagement from the State Department with their Chinese counterparts. If the State Department does act in time, many analysts believe it may opt for a short-term extension (rather than a full, five-year renewal), which would allow negotiators to pursue concessions on areas such as safeguarding intellectual property rights.
But even if the agreement is renewed, science and tech cooperation between the world’s two largest economies is unlikely to return to the halcyon days of the STA. Most notably, during the Obama administration, the STA set the foundation for the creation of the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC) — the most ambitious model of U.S.-China climate cooperation to date and a high water mark of U.S.-China government-to-government research collaboration.
The center’s creators had lofty ambitions of bringing together the U.S. and China’s top academic and commercial minds to produce tangible, commercial products to tackle climate change. Between 2011 and 2020, more than $400 million was funneled equally by both countries into the center, involving over 1,100 researchers at its peak. Uniquely for a government-led initiative, the CERC brought together not only national laboratories and academic institutions, but private and state-owned enterprises, including leading American corporations such as Dow Chemical, Duke Energy and Ford.
The CERC, notes Lewis, “was one of the largest bilateral initiatives with China the U.S. has ever done.”
But some of CERC’s largest achievements, such as innovations in battery technology, have now become flashpoints for each country’s ‘techno-nationalism,’ showing how yesterday’s research can become today’s national security concerns. Even during rosier geopolitical times, the CERC drew scrutiny, including congressional inquiries and a Government Accountability Office report. Persistent hesitations about sharing intellectual property and, ultimately, political neglect forced the initiative into a quiet death in the early months of the Covid pandemic, begging the question: If an initiative on clean energy can’t make it, what can?
Those who were involved in the CERC still see it as a model for what productive bilateral cooperation could be. John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) during the Obama administration, told The Wire that the goodwill produced by the CERC helped pave the way for the 2015 Paris Agreement, a breakthrough accord under which 195 countries agreed to keep the mean rise in global temperatures under 2°C.
But for every success of goodwill, the STA is at risk of falling victim to more palpable outcomes — namely, China’s huge advancements.
“I think on balance the Chinese benefited overall more than we did [from the STA], especially as in most fields they were playing catchup,” says Ken Lieberthal, a longtime China scholar and former director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. “Now, there’s some buyers’ regret in our political system.”
The U.S. political system is overdue for a reckoning with how far China has come in building up its own science and tech expertise. The question now is whether the STA can help aid that process, or if, after four decades, it will become a casualty of it.
ENERGIZED
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been a locus for U.S.-China scientific cooperation since the start. Months before the STA was signed in January 1979, then-energy secretary James Schlesinger led a delegation to China and reached agreements with Chinese counterparts to upgrade China’s coal and hydroelectric facilities, as well as for joint programs in particle and nuclear physics.
In the early years, science and technology cooperation took on a particular significance because the very notion of strengthening China’s capabilities in those fields served as a repudiation of the country’s recent past, when Mao Zedong persecuted scientists and intellectuals. Science and technology was one of the fields in Deng’s “Four Modernizations,” whose inclusion in the PRC’s constitution in 1977 helped to usher in the country’s Reform and Opening Up era. At that time, Lieberthal notes, China was so behind that America’s “benefits [from the STA] were in part social and, frankly, moral-ethical.”
As China industrialized, climate change became the obvious candidate for deepening joint cooperation. Efforts to assist China with cutting its air pollution began in the late 1990s, but became a central issue during the Obama administration, which signed more bilateral clean energy and climate agreements with China than any other U.S. administration. None, however, was as significant in scale and cost as the CERC.
The seeds of the CERC were planted in the months before President Obama’s inauguration, when a coalition of scholars led by the Asia Society and the Pew Center on Global Climate change put together an influential report titled “Roadmap for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change.” Among the report’s recommendations were to “determine strategic areas for joint research on pre-commercial, low-carbon energy technologies that would contribute to the creation of jointly-held intellectual property rights” and to “identify key technologies within each country that could benefit from public support in facilitating commercial technology transfers.”
The overarching vision for the program was that the two countries are stronger working together than working alone.
The roadmap was delivered to Obama’s transition team, and many of its contributors would subsequently land positions in the new government. They included Steven Chu, who co-chaired the report and became Obama’s first energy secretary; Holdren, who became director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); Todd Stern, who became special envoy for climate change at the State Department; and David Sandalow, who became assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at DOE.
The men wasted no time getting to work.
In the summer of 2009, Sandalow sat down for a meeting with Wan Gang, China’s then-minister for science and technology, and proposed an audacious plan: a new, bilateral initiative, to be jointly funded by the two countries, to collaborate on the development of clean energy technology. According to Sandalow, Wan immediately approved, and even reached across the table to shake hands.
“The overarching vision for the program was that the two countries are stronger working together than working alone,” Sandalow told The Wire.
A month after Wan Gang agreed to Sandalow’s proposal for the CERC, Chu — the energy secretary — landed in Beijing to announce its creation. In a speech at Tsinghua University, he described cooperation on clean energy as “one of the great opportunities of our time.”
From the start, it seems, Chu and Wan’s backgrounds guided the center’s focus on energy efficiency and clean vehicles. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, had previously served as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which was doing some of the U.S.’s leading research on energy-efficient buildings. Wan Gang, meanwhile, had studied mechanical engineering and briefly worked at Germany’s Audi, and would later gain the moniker China’s ‘father of electric cars.’
The CERC was not only a research lab. One of its key mandates was to bring cutting-edge technology to market, and in order to do so, it included private companies in its process. Dow Chemical, for example, was involved in several projects with U.S. national labs and Chinese institutes related to HVAC technology. American companies contributed a total of $38 million to the center to fund their own research.
“At a minimum, the role of the private companies was to co-fund the CERC,” says Georgetown’s Lewis, who is also the author of Cooperating for the Climate. “What they got out of it was they got to meet relevant stakeholders in China, which also helped with access to the Chinese market, if they weren’t already over there.”
U.S. companies were also drawn to the CERC because of the political cover it offered. A small U.S. startup called LP Amina, for example, ran into problems while working with a Chinese state-owned enterprise named Gemeng International Energy Co. The North Carolinian firm had invented a way to modestly improve the efficiency of coal power plants and to reduce their fossil fuel emissions, but it had struggled to find an American utility willing to commercialize the technology.1
(*1 LP Amina has since closed down.)
Gemeng initially agreed to build a demonstration unit using LP Amina’s technology in 2011, but soon demanded the exclusive rights to the firm’s technology throughout China. As Gemeng ratcheted up pressure on LP Amina to concede to its technology transfer demands, then-U.S. ambassador Gary Locke intervened on behalf of the CERC to help mediate the dispute.
Dennis Bracy, who was on the CERC’s executive committee and specialized in IP management issues, notes that this kind of high-level intervention helped the CERC navigate tricky issues. “It was clear to both sides that top government officials were looking at this very closely,” he says. “[Ambassador] Locke would gently get involved. You can never write that in a handbook, but if you have leaders who care and are bound by a sense of common benefit, then you have real potential. We found that under the CERC, the IP protections weren’t legally different, but they were perhaps morally different because of the visibility.”
Still, the need to rope top diplomats into company-level IP negotiations illustrated the high cost of keeping the initiative on the rails, as well as its exceptional nature. CERC participants might have had a U.S. ambassador on their side, but the center didn’t resolve fundamental — and ongoing — differences in how the U.S. and China treat intellectual property (IP) rights.
Indeed, figures showing the actual number of patents filed — a measure of the initiative’s innovative activity — suggest many U.S. companies were reluctant to share IP through CERC. Of the 70 patents filed by CERC participants in the first three years of its operation, 59 were filed by participants within their own countries. What few patents were filed overseas were exclusively filed by the Chinese participants in the U.S.; American participants filed none in China.
What’s more, over the CERC’s 10-year lifespan, not a single patent was filed jointly by U.S. and Chinese companies, suggesting that, despite the program’s lofty vision to develop jointly-owned intellectual property, participants were reluctant to trust one another with their most sensitive secrets.
“Looking back, I don’t know how realistic that goal was,” says Lewis. “Joint IP creation requires the highest degree of trust, compared to a joint paper or jointly hosting a workshop. You’re always going to withhold your highest value IP in the face of uncertainty. In this day and age, given how much has changed in the U.S.-China relationship, it almost seems inconceivable that that was a goal.”
As the CERC progressed, concerns about technology transfer accumulated in Congress. A particularly ugly episode took place in 2011, after Congress passed a provision introduced by then-Congressman Frank Wolf, a vocal China critic, that banned the White House’s OSTP and NASA from engaging in bilateral activities with China, citing technology transfer concerns. After OSTP director John Holdren defied the law on the advice of the Justice Department in order to host a meeting in Washington with Wan Gang, a furious Wolf threatened to have Holdren arrested. In the end, Wolf succeeded in getting Congress to slash the OSTP’s budget by a third.2
“Before everything went downhill, there was a lot of thinking that this tripartite model of engagement [between universities, governments and industry] was a good one,” says Suttmeier. “But the IP thing became such a toxic subject in the whole relationship.”
By the end of the Obama administration, says Bracy, the CERC executive committee member, “we kind of knew this wasn’t going to continue and that the Trump administration would have a different formula… There was a slow petering out not just of funding but of enthusiasm.”
This petering out could be seen in the CERC’s shrinking annual reports: from 130 pages in 2011 to 36 pages in 2015. Not a single annual report was published during the Trump administration, when IP and coerced technology transfers became a central issue to the escalating U.S.-China trade war. At the same time, federal funding for scientific cooperation and climate initiatives were slashed. By 2020, the CERC had all but evaporated. Even its website — a one-time repository of information about the lessons and achievements of the center — was quietly taken down.
“The most important thing the CERC taught us was a way to work together under conditions of trust, with structural elements built in that made everyone more comfortable with dealing with some of the more difficult aspects of the relationship,” says Denis Simon, a founding member of an advisory group to the U.S.-China Innovation Dialogue, another Obama-era science and technology initiative. “But we never got to revisit it as a model for going forward.”
PROVING A NEGATIVE
With the STA’s expiration date looming, a group of scholars and ex-Obama administration officials reconnected earlier this month for a virtual conference to assemble the case for renewal.
The panelists seemed in agreement that proponents of cooperation were on the backfoot these days. “We didn’t serve ourselves very well,” rued Simon. “There has been no compilation of the 40 years of [science and technology] cooperation in which we highlight the key successes… There isn’t the whole story told in a comprehensive kind of way.”
Part of the difficulty in summarizing the achievements of the STA is that many of its gains are relatively intangible. “The [science and technology] relationship ultimately came not only from the substance of science, but also from some of the softer things: the values, norms, ethics, culture of science, as well as things like access and reciprocity,” said Simon.
That may be true, but a persistent challenge for the STA is comparing what bilateral science and technology relations would look like in its absence. Unlike in 1979, scientific collaboration is happening between academic institutions and companies all over the world, largely independent of the governments of any country. If the STA was to expire tomorrow, it isn’t a given that all this research collaboration would go away with it too.
Advocates of the STA, however, argue that the U.S. relationship with China is different.
“With other countries, most [U.S.] researchers connect and collaborate without any recourse back to an agreement. But with China, [the STA] enables the relationship,” says Caroline Wagner, professor of public affairs at Ohio State University, noting that in China, the STA is seen as a prerequisite for most subsidiary interactions. “Underneath that agreement, there’s been more than 2,000 additional sub-agreements, MOUs, protocols and so on.”
Villanova’s Seligsohn adds that the agreement also protects American researchers working in China. “When they’re working on projects, if they’re out collecting biological specimens in the boonies somewhere and the local government decides to get worried, a simple call to the National Science Foundation of China solves the problem.” These protections, she notes, are especially important now, given China has been clamping down on information access in the name of data and national security.
China’s many recent clampdowns, however, also underscore the risk of cooperating with the country on science and technology. Chinese president Xi Jinping has candidly emphasized the need for China to leverage cutting-edge technology like AI weapons and hypersonic missiles for “intelligent warfare,” raising the stakes of any collaboration. Gone are the days when scientific cooperation with China was seen in the U.S. as a form of assistance.
“The issues that concern us today — IP rights protection, data privacy, civil-military fusion, cybersecurity — none of these were issues that bothered anybody during the early years of the agreement,” says Simon. “But in 2023, we have a whole new slew of issues that are dominating the agenda. I believe we shouldn’t let the agreement lapse, but we should go to the drawing board to come up with a new agreement that lasts us for the next 40 years.”
Mark Cohen, an expert on Chinese IP at Berkeley Law, says the turn in events calls for “more government involvement, not less,” and that any renewal of the STA should be accompanied by a significant renegotiation of its terms, especially as they relate to IP — even if it risks turning China off and curbing some areas of science and tech collaboration. A strong, albeit less productive, STA, he says, would still “be a valuable contribution because it would show this is how we collaborate with a peer science and technology power. Not having an STA — all that says is, basically, stop doing anything with China.”
Other proponents of the STA say it is fine as it is: as an umbrella agreement, it allows for wiggle room and negotiation in sub-agreements. “Most of the work done under the [STA] would never lead to a patent,” says Villanova’s Seligsohn, pointing to the list of joint accomplishments in public health and fundamental research that focus less on applied technology.
But almost all the experts The Wire spoke to agree that cutting off cooperative activities with China is something the U.S. can’t afford to do. Many seemed exasperated that something as quotidian as an expiration date could sever such a productive international collaboration, and there was a fear that something more important than politics is at risk of being sabotaged.
“It’s not that all scientists are oblivious to the importance of allocating resources and national security concerns, but it’s a very different mindset,” says Lieberthal. “There is an appreciation that the more we can understand, the better we understand the universe. China learned from us, and now they have experience that in some key fields exceeds ours. If we cut off learning from them in those areas, it’s just going to take us much longer to catch up.”
Expertise and capability in science and technology are now globalized. There is no one country that is, or can be, first in everything all by themselves.
Indeed, among the top 1 percent of papers in terms of academic citations — an exclusive segment comprising the most influential research — China beat out the U.S. for the first time last year, according to one study. But perhaps more importantly, according to Ohio State’s Wagner, while Chinese academic papers are increasingly cited, their joint research with U.S. scholars were on average more highly cited still. Put another way, the only thing more influential to the scientific community than Chinese research was Chinese research done in collaboration with Americans.
This trend, Holdren notes, is likely to hold. “Expertise and capability in science and technology are now globalized,” he says. “There is no one country that is, or can be, first in everything all by themselves. And in that sort of world, the arguments in favor of collaboration are even stronger than they were when the collaboration was more a matter of assistance.”
Eliot Chen is a Toronto-based staff writer at The Wire. Previously, he was a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Human Rights Initiative and MacroPolo. @eliotcxchen