By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Since the United States and China reopened diplomatic relations in the late 1970s, the leaders of both countries have recognized the value of having their universities work together in research and education to promote prosperity and friendship. Today, however, U.S. policymakers are so concerned about the potential transfer of advances in science and technology from American university laboratories to China that, step by step, sometimes intentionally and inadvertently, they discourage academic exchanges. Research papers authored jointly by U.S. and Chinese scientists fell in 2021 for the first time in decades, the number of American scientists of Chinese descent leaving the United States for China has ticked upward, and surveys of Chinese students thinking of studying abroad suggest that the United States is becoming a less desirable destination for many of them.

In late August, the U.S. government continued to signal its wariness about academic engagements with China by waiting until the last minute to renew the landmark U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement, which dates back to 1979. The agreement commits each country to encouraging contacts between their people and organizations, paving the way for joint research and exchanging scientists and students. The Biden administration has extended it for only another six months, and some lawmakers on Capitol Hill would like to see it expire.

Although China pursues its interests when working alongside the United States in scientific explorations, maintaining connections between the two countries’ scientists may be more critical than ever. The Beijing-Washington relationship has deteriorated into something akin to a new Cold War, setting up a dangerous rivalry that could damage both countries and the world. Universities can contribute to stabilizing this relationship without increasing the United States’ vulnerability to Chinese espionage or other efforts to benefit unduly from U.S. research—as long as they do not underestimate the risks posed by engaging with their counterparts based in a rival nation. But universities—and the U.S. government—should also avoid exaggerating the risks.

Universities have often played an essential role in lowering international tensions and encouraging mutual understanding. Even during the most fraught periods of the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union saw reasons to cooperate in academic science. The Lacy-Zaroubin Agreement of 1958 authorized the exchange of delegations of professors between Columbia University and Moscow University and between Harvard University and Leningrad University. The deal also charged the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of Sciences with promoting a broader series of visits. Eighteen years after these exchanges began, a panel led by MIT economist Carl Kaysen found that the academy-sponsored program had been a “striking, even spectacular” success in forging links between the two countries’ scientists, in helping the United States learn about Soviet capabilities in science and technology, and in improving relations between the two superpowers.

Of course, there are important differences between U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War and U.S.-Chinese relations today. The United States was not particularly tied to the Soviet Union economically. Still, it is to China, which means that economic and national security concerns are far more intertwined than during the Cold War. Today, many more technologies are dual-use, with commercial and military applications. This overlap complicates which research fields are too sensitive to allow for collaboration. Despite these differences, there is still reason to believe that academic exchanges can help people transcend their national narratives and find common ground in pursuing scientific truth.

 

Brain Gain

One of the most critical ways American universities promote mutual understanding between countries while advancing U.S. interests is by educating students worldwide.

 More international students come to the United States than any other country, with China and India as the top foreign sources of U.S. students. As is often noted, the ability of American universities to attract the world’s best talent is a key to the United States’ success. This is also the form of global engagement where the risks are smallest. Generally, students’ access to information is circumscribed so that they would have limited utility as foreign agents.

Yet, these days, I often hear the question: Why would an American university want to educate the human capital of an unfriendly country? The answer is that, on balance, educating international talent, including that of cold nations, is overwhelmingly beneficial to the United States. More than half of American doctorates go to international students nationwide in fields as crucial to the economy and national security as engineering, computer science, and mathematics. The National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates tells us that most international doctoral recipients—including nearly three of four Chinese doctoral recipients—intend to remain in the United States after their studies. And despite the obstacles the U.S. government sets, most find a way to stay.  In 2017, 90 percent of the STEM students from China who’d earned doctoral degrees in the United States between 2000 and 2015 were still in the United States, helping the country advance. Instead of contributing their considerable talents to their home country, they stay and contribute to the United States. This is a brain gain that the country should be celebrating.

Unfortunately, as a country, the United States has been undermining itself in recent years with policies that discourage brilliant students from attending American schools, beginning in 2017 with the Trump administration’s travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries. In 2018, the U.S. government shortened student visas for Chinese graduate students studying certain fields from five years to one year. In May 2020, the Trump administration announced its decision to deny visas to Chinese graduate students currently or previously affiliated with institutions that support China’s “military-civil fusion strategy.” The Biden administration has left this policy in place.

This restriction on Chinese graduate students is broad and opaque, and the criteria for its implementation have never been made clear. As long as it remains in effect, this policy is probably preventing between 3,000 and 5,000 Chinese students from entering U.S. graduate programs every year, according to a 2021 analysis published by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Although China has a national security law that compels its citizens to assist in intelligence gathering whenever it is demanded, reports of Chinese students engaging in activities that threaten U.S. national or economic security are rare.

Once international graduate students are in the United States, it can be difficult for them to remain. After they earn their degrees, most will move from one type of temporary status to another without a clear path to a green card for permanent residency. Because the United States has strict annual quotas by country and by category for green cards, graduate students often have to wait years before being assured that they and their families won’t be unexpectedly uprooted.

Many international graduate students at universities such as MIT become entrepreneurs, often spinning new companies out of their research in our laboratories. However, the United States offers no visa specifically for these young founders and requires employer sponsorship. These founders generally have to prove that they are employees of their startups—and can be fired—forcing them to choose to lose control of their inventions or leave the country.

Washington has a considerable bipartisan consensus that the government needs to fix this situation and make it as easy for international students who earn advanced degrees in STEM fields to stay, work, and launch companies in the United States. Over the years, there have been several proposals to “staple a green card” to the diplomas of international graduate students in STEM fields. In July, Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.Dak.) introduced legislation exempting advanced STEM graduates from green card quotas. However, such proposals have been consistently held up in Congress because of the heated disagreement surrounding comprehensive immigration reform.

What if the U.S.-educated students don’t stay and instead return home to help the United States’ geopolitical rivals build their capabilities? They return home with the perspectives gained on U.S. campuses. Educated young people are often the only hope for social and political progress in countries that oppress their people today.

 

When To Say No

Other engagements with China, including collaborations in research and institutional partnerships, demand more circumspection from universities. Beijing aspires to rival Washington in economic, diplomatic, and military power and to develop a new world order that promotes different principles from those that underpin the system the United States and its allies built after World War II. Unsurprisingly, Beijing has tried to benefit from technologies invented in the West, and it has sometimes done so through industrial espionage and the theft of intellectual property.

But China is the world’s other great superpower in science and engineering, just behind the United States in its combined public- and private-sector investments in research and development. Because of the quality of the study now being conducted in China, Chinese researchers are the most frequent international co-authors for American researchers in peer-reviewed science and engineering journals. For that reason, putting blanket limitations on collaborating with Chinese peers would mean limiting U.S. progress. Nonetheless, both countries are pressured to construct higher barriers to research and educational exchanges.

In 2019, MIT tightened its review process for potential international collaborations with China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia and projects elsewhere that may carry unique risks. Proposals are carefully screened, and a small committee of top administrators reviews the thorniest proposals. By 2021, as tensions grew between the United States and China, it was clear to MIT that it needed to articulate a strategy specifically for China. The university formed a group to study the problem. It charged it with finding a balance between gaining the benefits of scientific and educational collaboration and avoiding undermining U.S. national or economic security or human rights in China. The group’s recommendations, which are now university policy, preclude as potential research partners China’s national defense universities, military research institutes, national defense laboratories at civilian universities, and companies that are Chinese military providers or whose activities contribute to the oppression of Chinese citizens.

Because faculty members initiate most engagements with China, the group’s report offered MIT researchers guidance on what activities they can and should undertake and those they should avoid. The university urges researchers to ensure the benefits of any collaboration will be mutual. It also urges them to avoid participating in talent recruitment programs that pay scientists from other nations to conduct research in China or to open laboratories there and establish norms within their research group surrounding information sharing.

As universities consider the risks involved in any international engagement, they should also consider what they risk by not collaborating with foreign partners. If universities can strike the right balance, they can safeguard open scientific research, open exchange, and the free flow of ideas and people while still recognizing that, when dealing with countries that have authoritarian governments, the goodwill of individual researchers does not guarantee a good result.

 

Wrongly Accused

Sometimes, however, when it comes to China, the government from which U.S. academics need protection is their own. In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department launched the China Initiative to address the theft of sensitive data and technologies by people funded by the Chinese government. Many academic scientists and engineers felt stigmatized by these investigations because they were born in China or were of Chinese descent. Add to this a wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic, and the result was a sense of fear and anxiety among people whose talents the United States has long welcomed.

At MIT, this quickly became personal, as one of our colleagues, Gang Chen, a distinguished professor and an expert in heat transfer and energy conversion, was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors with failing to disclose Chinese affiliations on grant applications. We had faith in him initially, and the Department of Justice ultimately dropped the charges. His story was not unique: several such cases against university researchers were dropped or dismissed.

The Department of Justice has since recognized the unfairness of the China Initiative name, which suggested a lower threshold for prosecution for people with Chinese ties or heritage—and retired the program in favor of its broader Strategy for Countering Nation-State Threats. But the effects still linger, with researchers such as Chen, who were wrongly accused, now much more cautious in their work and in their decisions about whether to seek federal funding or which students and collaborators to take on. A recently published survey of Chinese American university scientists sponsored by the Asian American Scholar Forum found that 72 percent do not feel safe as an academic researcher in the United States, 65 percent are worried about collaborations with China, and 86 percent find it harder to recruit international students.

In considering security risks, every university should go beyond mere compliance with government rules and put policies in place to help the institution and individual faculty members decide when foreign collaborations are appropriate and when they are not. And clearly, the United States government must take action against anyone illicitly transferring technologies to other countries. However, it is up to both government and university leaders to ensure that legitimate national security concerns do not result in indiscriminate policies that make most academic exchanges impossible. Different kinds of collaborations involve various levels of risk, and they should be assessed accordingly. For example, associations where each country’s scientists work in their laboratories but publish together may raise fewer issues than those in which laboratories are shared.

There are also specific fields—such as climate change, pandemic prevention, cancer treatment, and food safety—where the risks of collaborating are small and the potential benefits to humanity are immense. Even in those areas of science and engineering in which China and the United States are ferociously competitive, it may be possible to join forces on fundamental, pre-competitive research. The scientific advances resulting from such collaborations are openly published to benefit the world—even as the two nations race each other to develop applications based on that science to their advantage.

 

Great-Power Education

Suppose American universities are strongly discouraged from working with China. In that case, they will no longer have the ability to accelerate progress on global challenges by sharing ideas and resources with Chinese scientists or to improve themselves through collaboration, competition, and attracting great talent. And, most importantly, the United States will understand much less about where China stands—not just in terms of technology development and military modernization but also in terms of its people’s goals and aspirations.

Unfortunately, China now seems less interested in being known. It has cut off foreign access to its most important academic databases, frustrating not just U.S. scientists and engineers but also Americans who study China’s economy, politics, culture, and history and who help the United States comprehend its most significant geopolitical competitor.

Scientific cooperation is essential to diplomacy, generating open-mindedness, patience, and fellow feeling. Once they begin working together for a higher cause, faculty and students from countries with long-standing animosities often overcome their cultural biases and learn to respect each other as peers. Connections forged in academic settings can have enormous geopolitical consequences: During the Cold War, the trust American scientists established with their Soviet colleagues while considering purely scientific issues helped to lead to bilateral agreements on arms control.  Although not everyone approves of the Iran nuclear agreement reached in 2015, the fact that a deal could be achieved at all was surely helped by the MIT connection shared by two of the key people negotiating it: then U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, a longtime MIT faculty member, and Ali Akbar Salehi, then head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and an MIT alumnus. Moniz has said that although the two men did not know each other at MIT, they had mutual friends and professional contacts thanks to their affiliation with the university, which helped them build mutual trust.

The United States must develop a fuller understanding of its strategic competitors to challenge them and seek common ground for peaceful coexistence and mutual prosperity in a non-zero-sum world. If the United States and China cease trying to understand each other, the results may be catastrophic.

Universities can build bridges through education, research, and joint problem-solving. Because they employ the shared common language of science and scholarship, they are sometimes the only institutions still able to build those bridges when dialogue seems impossible. American universities should embrace the responsibility to build them despite the political headwinds.

 

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