On December 25, the Associated Press broadcast a report titled "U.S.-China Tensions Are Weakening Long-Cultivated Academic Ties, Will This Apathy Hurt U.S. Interests?"The report is compiled as follows:
In the 80s of the last century, Fu Xiangdong, a young Chinese student, came to the United States to study biochemistry. Years later, he received a well-respected faculty position in California and was engaged in research on Parkinson's disease for a long time.
But now, Professor Fu is doing research at a Chinese university. Previously, as U.S.-China relations deteriorated, his cooperation with Chinese universities came under scrutiny. His career in the United States went off track and he eventually resigned.
Professor Fu's story reflects the rise and fall of U.S.-China academic cooperation.
This cooperation, which began at the end of the 70s of the last century, continued for decades. But now, as Washington views Beijing as a strategic adversary and concerns about Chinese espionage are rising, U.S.-China academic cooperation is on the wane.
It's not just students and researchers who are hurting this setback. Analysts say this will undermine U.S. competitiveness and undermine global efforts to address health challenges.
For some, the prospect of scientific progress needs to give way to security considerations, given rising tensions. This is at the heart of the China Initiative. The program was launched by Trump in 2018 to expose economic espionage. While it failed to catch any spies, it did have an impact on researchers at U.S. universities.
Under the plan, Chen Gang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, was charged in 2021 with concealing ties to the Chinese authorities. Prosecutors eventually dropped all charges, but Chen Gang lost his research team.
A study published in June in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said that the China Initiative may have caused widespread fear and anxiety among scientists of Chinese descent.
The researchers wrote that they surveyed 1,304 Chinese-American scientists employed by U.S. colleges and universities, and the results showed that many considered leaving the U.S. or no longer applying for federal grants.
Another analysis of studies in the Pubmed database** showed that as of 2021, scientists in the U.S. still co-authored more works with Chinese scientists than scientists from any other country, but after 2019, there was a decline in research by scientists who had worked with China.
Jia Ruixue, the scholar who led the National Institutes of Health investigation, said: "This has had a chilling effect on the scientific community. While researchers will manage to complete existing collaborative projects, they are reluctant to start new ones, and the results may get worse. Both countries have been hurt. (Compiled by Wu Mei).