The long, messy history of U.S.-China research collaboration took a halting step to get back in sync on Friday, when the Biden administration renewed a lapsed science and technology pact between the two countries. The agreement allows Washington and Beijing to keep cooperating on non-sensitive, basic research in all kinds of scientific fields — but draws a line at anything more advanced, particularly the critical emerging technologies where the U.S. and China are in direct competition to chart the future, like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. The deal is an attempt to stake out “this wonderful middle ground where we both can win out of this,” said Denis Simon, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft who spoke with officials from both countries during their nine months of negotiations. “It’s not that the threat is zero,” he told DFD, “and it's not that you know that every project is going to be a tremendous upside win, but that's the nature of science. You experiment, you try to break the new ground, you try to open up a new frontier.” The 21st century brought a shift in how research and development is conducted, defined by more globalization and collaboration across disciplines. Researchers from the two countries have worked closely together for years on academic research in fields like genomics, public health, climate modeling and even space. With the agreement in place to encourage the exchange of scientific knowledge — while also setting boundaries for those collaborations — Chinese and U.S. academics over the years have mapped the rice genome, leading to breakthroughs in crop improvement; found more cost effective ways to capture carbon emissions; improved monitoring networks for earthquakes; and made early progress on alternative materials. That basic research alone did not give rise to the next iteration of cutting-edge tech, but it became the background for applied work that the countries then pursued, often independently. For example, some new materials advanced through U.S.-China collaborations went into battery technologies and specialty microchips — propagating through both economies. But relations between the two countries are now far more complex. China is no longer the scientific laggard it was at the inception of the Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement in 1979. Today, the U.S. and China are the world’s biggest economies and each other’s fiercest rivals, both vying to lead as much as possible in emerging technologies — and to rapidly integrate them into their own militaries. The 45-year-old agreement has generally endured the ups and downs of the relationship: an ongoing tit-for-tat over restrictions on sensitive technology, Trump’s controversial campaign to stamp out Chinese espionage in American research and industry, as well as numerous accusations lodged at Beijing for intellectual property theft. It has typically been renewed with less fanfare every five years to set the ground rules for the two nations to work on scientific discovery and technological innovation across dozens of domains. This time, however, the agreement was about to expire in August 2023, when tensions were running hot. The White House put it on life support with two brief extensions while a more comprehensive deal was negotiated against the wishes of Republican China hawks. Without clear boundaries in place, and universities facing pressure from Washington to avoid any research that could be interpreted as sensitive, American researchers have recently become much more skittish about tackling scientific problems with their Chinese counterparts. Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select China Committee, was among the lawmakers who lodged concerns that China too often failed to uphold its agreements with the U.S. He pushed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to suspend negotiations, at least until China made substantial concessions on intellectual property protections and reciprocity in data exchanges. (China recently put in place a set of data security regulations that the U.S. has considered opaque.) Trump’s imminent return also accelerated the criticism. GOP lawmakers accused the Biden administration of easing up to rush a deal through. Moolenaar and more than a dozen Republicans told Blinken in a Friday letter that “a renewal of the STA in the final days of the administration is a clear attempt to tie the hands of the incoming administration.” Groups including the Heritage Foundation have since called on the Trump administration and Congress to review whether the U.S. should renegotiate the agreement come Jan. 20. Trump could conceivably let the agreement lie dormant by stonewalling all projects in the pipeline for the next five years to avoid dismantling it entirely (which would be a symbolic snub). Even supporters of renewing the agreement argued it needed an overhaul to safeguard U.S. innovation with China’s emergence as a scientific powerhouse. (China has overtaken the U.S. in research output, as articles co-written with American scientists become rarer.) The State Department said it had modernized the agreement with new guardrails to defend U.S. academics and strengthened provisions on data transparency and reciprocity. “We more or less put together a brand new agreement that no longer suffered from the absence of these new issues,” said Simon. “It will be rather difficult in effect, to propose fields and get them approved because they will go through sort of a gauntlet.” Dennis Wilder, a former senior intelligence official and current fellow at Georgetown University’s Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue, told DFD he would have liked to see much tougher negotiations, and was disappointed the agreement did not have more teeth in the wake of incidents like the Chinese Salt Typhoon hack into American telecom networks. “We have become much more aware over the last few years of Chinese hacking and Chinese aggressive stealing of American technology, of American science,” he said. “Any agreement you go into now has to have penalties on the Chinese, not just guardrails.” He interpreted the move as “the Biden administration was desperate at the end of this administration to get a deal and to try and lock the Trump administration.” A State Department spokesperson responded to the criticism, saying “we took the time necessary to make sure that this was the strongest possible agreement” and that “the United States will continue to take necessary actions to prevent advanced U.S. technologies from being used to undermine our national security.” Simon disagreed, saying he didn’t see it as the Biden administration sending a message to Trump but rather as a gesture of goodwill toward China to maintain an open system even in abnormal times. Some Chinese tech breakthroughs like Huawei’s five-nanometer chip have already caught the U.S. off guard. “If we were to really decouple or disengage, we might lose access to China. And losing access means we would not be able to spot where the next emerging pocket of excellence is, where the next achievement is coming from,” he said.
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