Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — As contending interests and visions for the world continue to complicate the US-China relationship, the US government has taken steps to address security concerns in the science and technology domain, including misappropriation of research and malign technology transfer.
Some of these approaches, however, have generated negative consequences, according to prominent Chinese American scholars.
That’s why the Hoover Institution’s Program on the US, China, and the World gathered scientists and China scholars together on November 7, 2024, to discuss a new path for facilitating academic collaboration between US and international researchers while also addressing security concerns and overcoming mistrust and fear.
Attendees pointed to the China Initiative, launched by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in November 2018, as an approach that was emblematic of their concerns. Only one quarter of the initiative’s prosecutions yielded a conviction, and the Department of Justice said it wound down the effort in 2022.
But its impact lingers, leaving a chilling affect among American scholars of Chinese descent.
“I have colleagues and graduate students being visited by the FBI unannounced; now we have learned the procedure to handle this situation, but a few years ago nobody knew how to handle this situation,” said panelist Zhenan Bao, a Stanford engineering professor who founded the university’s Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWear) in 2016.
Even for those who did not come under government scrutiny, Bao said, the initiative contributed to a pervasive sense of hatred against Asian American scholars.
“There were colleagues who would walk around campus and have people say to them, ‘Go back to your country,’” Bao said. “We have been here as long as everyone else. We are just US citizens like everyone else.”
“I was very angry when I heard that.”
Other PhD students told Bao the situation from 2018–22 made them reconsider the United States as their first-choice destination to live and work.
So while there is a genuine threat of research theft and espionage that works to the benefit of China, it’s clear there needs to be a reset in the way the US government and universities address these issues, said Distinguished Research Fellow and panelist Glenn Tiffert, cochair of Hoover’s Program on the US, China, and the World.
“Unfortunate choices were made in the last several years, and now there is a lot of pain and mistrust, and a lot of trust to earn back in the scientific community and the Asian American community,” Tiffert added.
In addressing the DOJ’s China Initiative, panelist Yasheng Huang, economics and management professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, told the group that applying a federal law enforcement approach to the problem has reduced the productivity of US-based scientists by up to 11 percent.
“We can say we are protecting our national security, but what we are failing to protect is the future of science,” he said. “In the future if there are drugs that we fail to discover, that is a cost of this approach.”
He said the US government and research institutions need to partner in forging a new path forward, where mutually beneficial international scientific collaboration can thrive.
Part of that new path may lie in the National Science Foundation’s Safeguarding the Entire Community of the US Research Ecosystem (SECURE) program, led by Texas A&M University in partnership with Hoover and Parallax Advanced Research. Hoover’s participation in SECURE, with Tiffert as a co-principal investigator, will deliver data, computer tools, and analytical products that facilitate collaborative research and innovation by helping to identify, assess, and mitigate research security risks and vulnerabilities in partnership with the scientific community.
Another part of that path involves acknowledging and adjusting to changing global conditions.
Huang pointed out that that China’s government seeks to divert scientific research to military applications that could pose risks to the United States, and Tiffert added that it is a mistake today to behave as if scientific collaboration with scholars in China were the same as with counterparts in free and open democracies.
“We need to adapt to China the way it is,” Tiffert said. “The danger is to treat China the same as our other partners.”
“China is not Canada; China is not Germany.”
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still value in US-China collaboration on scientific research.
There are mutually beneficial projects for scholars from the two nations to cooperate on, and it is crucial to identify, assess, and mitigate the security challenges those projects may entail in principled, evidence-based ways.
“We’re not collaborating with another country for the sake of collaborating,” Bao said. “When we collaborate with others, we do better work.”
