In January 2020, Charles Lieber, the Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, was led into a federal court in Boston in a yellow jumpsuit and handcuffs.\u00a0 Lieber, whose lab was lavishly funded by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was criminally charged with making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” about his links to the Chinese government\u2019s Thousand Talents Program (TTP). In June 2020, he was indicted by a grand jury on one count of lying to an investigator from the DoD and one count of lying to Harvard University about his three-year \u201cEmployment Contract of \u2018One Thousand Talent\u2019 High Level Foreign Expert\u201d with Wuhan University of Technology. If convicted, Lieber faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.<\/p>\n
In May 2019, Emory University in Atlanta summarily terminated Li Xiaojiang and his wife Li Shihua, U.S. citizens of Chinese origin who had been employed by Emory for 23 years.\u00a0 They were internationally recognized for their work on using genetically engineered mice and pigs to study Huntington\u2019s disease.\u00a0 The Emory administration closed down the laboratory and gave four Chinese postdocs working there 30 days to leave the country.\u00a0 The charges? The couple \u201cwho were named as key personnel on NIH grant awards to Emory University, had failed to fully disclose foreign sources of research funding and the extent of their work for research institutions and universities in China.\u201d They are just two of a dozen or more biomedical researchers of Chinese origin who have recently been charged with failing to report conflicts of financial interest or conflicts of professional commitment on NIH grant applications. \u00a0In May 2020, Li Xiaojiang was convicted for filing tax returns that omitted the income he received from his work abroad. He had to repay more than $35,000 to the IRS.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration does not disparage international scientific collaboration. It is well aware that innovation and creativity flourish in an open, free-wheeling intellectual environment.\u00a0 Time and again, Bill Priestap, the Assistant Director of the FBI\u2019s Counterintelligence Division until 2018, has emphasized the enormous intellectual, financial, and cultural contribution that 1.4 million international students bring to the U.S. each year.\u00a0 He notes that in 2017 they contributed $36.9 billion to the U.S. economy and supported 450,000 jobs. By paying full tuition, they also help an underfunded higher education system balance its books. In fact, Priestap insists that the \u201cvast majority\u201d of foreign nationals poses no threat to their home institutions, fellow classmates, or to their research fields.<\/p>\n
Why, then, has the current administration taken a particularly aggressive approach to potential abuses of international academic collaboration with China? Is this just another aspect of the general deterioration of relations between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, fueled by technological and economic rivalry between the two countries?\u00a0 Or are there also deeper, structural changes at work that are reconfiguring relationships between two countries? I will argue that the access that thousands of Chinese students and researchers have to advanced academic research in science and engineering, which is tightly coupled to American economic and military power, lies at the heart of the emerging confrontation between them.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whether or not one agrees with President Trump\u2019s responses to the challenge from Beijing (and a majority of people, be they Republicans or Democrats, do see China as a major threat), the fact of the matter is that any U.S. administration \u2014 and the U.S. research system \u2014 will have to deal with a China that has every intention of becoming a leading scientific, technological, and economic power by the mid-21st<\/sup> century, in competition with the United States. The traditional values enshrined in the U.S. research system are engaged in that competition and will not emerge unscathed.<\/p>\n The paper has three main sections. First, I briefly place international academic collaboration between the U.S. and China in historical perspective.\u00a0 By comparing the responses to a similar challenge to the U.S. research system in the Reagan era, I can highlight the specific features of the current conflict that set it apart from the situation that faced the government 30 years ago.\u00a0\u00a0 That conflict, I argue, arises because America\u2019s economic security, which is fostered by an increasingly commercialized academia, is being threatened by scholars who do cutting-edge research in the U.S., and who are being attracted (back) to China by Beijing\u2019s talent recruitment programs, where they help strengthen the Chinese innovation system. After briefly analyzing the historical roots of this situation, I will conclude by drawing attention to the policies that have been adopted, or that are being considered, to regulate U.S.\u2013China academic exchanges, and their implications.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n A Quick Look Back to The Soviet Challenge in the 1980s <\/strong><\/p>\n There is an uncanny resemblance between the wave of anxiety that swept through the Reagan administration in the 1980s and the fears aroused by China\u2019s legal and illegal efforts to acquire advanced scientific and technological knowledge today. \u00a0The scale of Moscow\u2019s effort at the time emerged in the so-called Farewell Dossier, a collection of 4,000 KGB documents handed over by a defector to French authorities in 1981. \u00a0\u00a0They revealed that the Soviets had built a vast technology acquisition system that was “well-organized, centrally directed, and growing\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 Secretary of Commerce Lawrence Brady remarked in March 1982 that, \u201cOperating out of embassies, consulates, and so-called \u2018business delegations,\u2019 KGB operatives have blanketed the developed capitalist countries with a network that operates like a gigantic vacuum cleaner sucking up formulas, patents, blueprints, and know-how with frightening precision.\u201d \u00a0He complained bitterly that the Soviets were able \u201cto exploit the \u2018soft underbelly\u2019\u201d of American openness, including \u201cthe desire of academia to jealously preserve its prerogatives as a community of scholars unencumbered by government regulation.\u201d<\/p>\n These charges against academia were laid to rest by a Panel on Scientific Communication and National Security established by the National Academies complex in consultation with the Department of Defense. Its report, published in October 1982, made two major contributions. First, it exonerated universities from any significant responsibility for sensitive knowledge leaking to the Soviet Union.\u00a0 Second, it stipulated that \u201cto the maximum extent possible, the products of fundamental research should remain unrestricted.\u201d Fundamental research was defined as \u201cbasic and applied research in science and engineering, the results of which ordinarily are published and shared broadly in the research community\u2026.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nationality was not a criterion for active participation in fundamental research as long as it was not classified or of proprietary interest. It remains the formal definition of academic freedom in the practice of research on American campuses, even though it has been challenged repeatedly over the last decade or more. As a matter of fact, it is being challenged today. The rest of this paper will explain why.<\/p>\n The Trump Administration\u2019s Assault on Sino-American Scientific Collaboration<\/strong><\/p>\n As of 2018, there has been a sharp uptick in Congressional hearings, reports by Congressional committees and by Washington think tanks, as well as news articles, discussing the challenges posed by U.S. scientific and technological collaboration with China.\u00a0 The tenor of the debate was set in a joint hearing of two subcommittees of the Congressional Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in April 2018. Its title, Scholars or Spies? Foreign Plots Targeting America\u2019s Research and Development, <\/em>implied that scholars were indeed agents of foreign governments acquiring America\u2019s R&D. \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0This charge had been made by Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2018. Asked by Senator Marco Rubio to comment on \u201cthe counterintelligence risk posed to U.S. national security from Chinese students, particularly those in advanced programs in the sciences and mathematics,\u201d Wray replied that in his view, \u201cThe China threat is not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it\u2019s going to take a whole-of-society response by us.\u201d Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in April 2019, he asserted that everyone was in on it, including the thousands of Chinese students and researchers who work and study in the U.S. every year. “Put plainly, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder at our expense.\u201d Wray also deplored \u201cthe level of na\u00efvet\u00e9 on the part of the academic sector about this\u2026. They\u2019re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere, but they\u2019re taking advantage of it,\u201d targeting \u201cour information and ideas, our innovation, our research and development, our technology.\u201d\u00a0 To make matters worse, when fundamental research was funded by federal agencies liked the NSF or the NIH, American taxpayers were unwittingly funding technological advancements and innovative breakthroughs that helped foreign nations to gain a competitive advantage over the U.S.<\/p>\n Wray\u2019s charges resonate strongly with the Reagan administration\u2019s narrative in the 1980s as regards academia. In fact, many commentators speak of a new \u201cCold War\u201d in the making. The similarities should not be exaggerated. The Soviet leadership did not prioritize economic modernization in the 1980s. It enhanced its military footprint with the deployment of SS-20 missiles targeting Europe and the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. By contrast, the Chinese leadership explicitly seeks to acquire a dominant place in global markets by 2049. Trade relationships between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were tightly controlled in the 1980s (while America had a trade deficit of $345 billion with China in 2019).\u00a0 And there was relatively little intellectual exchange between the superpowers either (while there were some 365,000 Chinese students in American institutions of higher education in 2019). This is not (yet) a clash between two military systems.\u00a0 It is a competition for economic power that is underpinned by ceaseless innovation in which university training and research in science and engineering play a crucial role. In what follows, I will highlight a few important developments in both the U.S. and in China that have brought matters to a head today.<\/p>\n The U.S.: Economic Security and the National Security Innovation Base<\/strong><\/p>\n Economic security is national security, and it lies at the heart of American prosperity.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the view of President Trump himself in the Executive\u2019s National Security Strategy statement released in December 2017. The importance of \u201ceconomic security\u201d can be traced back to the growing conviction in the late cold war that military power based on ceaseless technological innovation would not ensure America\u2019s capacity to maintain a global Pax Americana. It needed to be combined with economic strength to protect key strategic industries from ruthless competitors \u2014 including allies \u2014 in global markets. As two leading members of the Washington establishment put it in 1990, \u201cInternational competition has eroded the once commanding U.S. advantage in technology\u2026when it comes to advanced technology national security can no longer be viewed in exclusively military terms: economic security and industrial competitiveness are also vital considerations.\u201d<\/p>\n Leading in research, technology, invention, and innovation is key to achieving economic security. The National Security Strategy document of 2017 sees university research as a central player in securing that leadership. The FRE specifically distinguished between basic and applied research in universities and colleges, and classified research in national laboratories like Los Alamos, as well as proprietary research in industry.\u00a0 These distinctions are now dissolved. Universities are included in a so-called National Security Innovation Base, \u201cthe American network of knowledge, capabilities, and people \u2014 including academia, National Laboratories and the private sector \u2014 that turns ideas into innovations, transform discoveries into successful commercial products and companies, and promotes and enhances the American way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n And here we come to the second key feature of the current conflict: this blurring of the boundary between universities and the private sector that results from the commercialization of academic research.\u00a0 \u00a0The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, and subsequent revisions, gave universities patent and intellectual property rights over the results of research funded by the federal government. In doing so, it liberated the entrepreneurial energies of the academic community. As a result, according to an official report in 2012, \u201cToday, American research universities are closer to the marketplace than they have ever been, with a focus on translating and transferring research discoveries to industry.\u201d (Lieber\u2019s CV states that he has no less than 65 awarded and pending patents.) In short, as universities have become key sources of innovation for industry, so the boundary between basic and applied research, protected by the Fundamental Research Exclusion, and the development or commercialization of research results, protected by patents, has become increasingly blurred. For someone like Lawrence Tabak, the principal Deputy Director of the NIH, it has virtually disappeared. \u201cEven something in the fundamental research space, that\u2019s absolutely not classified, has intrinsic value,\u201d he says.\u00a0 This \u201cpre-patented\u201d material \u201cis the antecedent to creating intellectual property. In essence, what you\u2019re doing is stealing other people\u2019s ideas,\u201d he claims. The implication is that all research covered by the FRE is so pregnant with commercial possibilities that it has to be treated as if it were patentable and protected, or else it will be \u201cstolen.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bayh-Dole Act was signed into law when most foreign nationals on U.S. campuses were from allied countries.\u00a0 Today the situation is very different.\u00a0 American universities award about 5,000 PhDs in science and engineering to Chinese students every year. The shift in the focus of university research toward the development-end of the R&D spectrum, and a culture that encourages its commercialization, introduces them to know-how and knowledge that are close to the market. While the greater majority stay in the U.S., an increasing number return to their homeland, where they are joined by experts temporarily recruited by China’s Thousand Talents and similar state-sponsored programs.\u00a0 Let\u2019s look more closely at these developments that are of immense concern to the FBI and the federal funders of fundamental research.<\/p>\n China\u2019s Talent Recruitment Program and Its Innovation Development Strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n What is the scale and scope of China\u2019s innovation system today?\u00a0 The National Science Board\u2019s 2020 report on science and technology indicators provides one with a time-sensitive picture of the stunning rise to prominence of the Chinese innovation system. It notes that while gross domestic expenditures on R&D in the U.S. almost doubled between 2000 and 2017, China has experienced a tenfold increase over the same period to reach about 90 percent of the U.S.\u2019s figure. In 2015 China awarded 32,000 PhDs in natural science and engineering, bypassing the U.S.\u2019s 30,000. China\u2019s S&E publication output has risen tenfold since the year 2000 so that China\u2019s output in terms of absolute quantity now exceeds that of the U.S. This has been accompanied by a growth in quality, as measured by the citation rates of papers published by authors in China. China has also become a desirable partner for the American research community: in 2018, 39 percent of scientific papers published by an author based in the U.S. were co-authored with someone in another country.\u00a0 More than a quarter of these (about 56,000) were with partners in China, more than with any other nation. This collaboration is facilitated by overseas Chinese living and working in the U.S. who are imbued with what historian of science Zuoyue Wang calls a spirit of \u201ccultural nationalism,\u201d expressed through their \u201cidentification with the developmental aspirations of their country of origin.\u201d \u00a0The administration often presents U.S.-Chinese scientific cooperation as a one-way transfer of knowledge and technology from this country to China, as happened with the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and early \u201880s.\u00a0 The picture that emerges here is of a dumbbell, not a vacuum cleaner, with two equally weighted communities at each end joined by a bridge of mutual respect.<\/p>\n China\u2019s official talent recruitment programs were devised to compensate for the \u201cbrain drain\u201d of gifted scholars to foreign countries. As of 2013, no less than 84% of Chinese students who received Ph.D. degrees in science or engineering stayed in the United States for at least five years.1<\/a><\/sup> Talent programs sought to take advantage of the intellectual assets of overseas Chinese, and of foreign scholars, to inject new ideas and expertise into the indigenous innovation system. It is the participation by Charles Lieber at Harvard, by Li Xiaojiang and his wife Li Shihua at Emory, and many other U.S.-based researchers who are funded by the Thousand Talents Program (TTP) that is being targeted by the U.S. administration today.<\/p>\n The TTP was established in 2008. A recent authoritative study estimated that by 2018 the program had recruited about 7,000 well-educated and highly skilled researchers.2<\/a><\/sup> Participants in the program have several options to choose from, including short-term, long-term and entrepreneurial fellowships. The program recruits established scholars, young professionals, and \u201ctop-notch talents and teams.\u201d A short-term contract requires a three-year commitment to spend at least two months a year in China. The long-term contract will usually be for people under 55 years of age willing to work in China on a full-time basis. They must have full-time professorships in prestigious foreign universities or R&D institutes or have senior titles from well-known international companies or financial institutions. Salaries and benefits are generous and go along with substantial start-up funds \u2014 RMB1million (about US$150,000) for established scholars.<\/p>\n