The Sweeping-Doors Moment in History of China: How the Chinese Revolution Has Been Learned to Defend the United States

Mr. Fleming reminded us that the Western allies view themselves as competing with the world’s other major nuclear powers in a very fast way. Of the two, he clearly regards Russia as the more manageable.

Due to the importance of trade with China, most European nations have not made much of their public critique of Beijing and its ambitions. It was possible forbritain to allowHuawei to provide 5G equipment to its communications network because of sanctions imposed on the company by the United States.

The warnings Mr. Fleming has given about the Chinese approach to investment in new technologies and their effort to create Client economies and Governments sound very similar to speeches given by his American counterparts over the past five or more years. But he spoke just before the opening of a Communist Party congress starting in Beijing on Sunday at which Xi Jinping is expected to be named to a third five-year term as the country’s top leader.

Mr. Fleming said that in the case of China, this could be “the sliding-doors moment in history,” in which the United States and its allies may soon discover that they are too far behind in a series of critical technologies to maintain a military or technological edge over Beijing.

He described China’s move to develop central bank digital currencies that could be used to track transactions as a shift that could also “enable China to partially evade the sort of international sanctions currently being applied to Putin’s regime in Russia.” He said that was one example of how China was “learning the lessons” from the war in Ukraine, presumably to apply them if it decided to move against Taiwan and prompted further efforts by the U.S. and its allies to isolate it economically.

Mr. Fleming said that China has a doctrine of denying other countries access to space in the event of a conflict. And he accused China of trying to alter international technology standards to ease the tracking of individuals, part of its effort to repress dissent, even the speech of Chinese citizens living abroad.

The climate of fear and anxiety hasn’t gone away — researchers are just being pressured in a new way, says Jenny Lee, a social scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies research collaborations and geopolitics. The US government has adopted anti-China policies since the official shutdown of the initiative. The DoJ is still pursuing fewer criminal charges, but it will work with federal agencies to investigate researchers and issue civil and administrative penalties for noncompliance. Universities are also taking a more active role in assisting investigations and pursuing potential wrongdoing, sources tell Nature.

The settlement sends a clear message that discrimination and profiling are not okay, and the government will be held to account according to a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Anming Hu says Chen’s win will encourage other scientists to fight for justice and compensation. Hu was indicted for hiding ties with China in 2020, and was put under house arrest for around two years before being acquitted of all charges.

The criminal charges were dropped because of some weaknesses in the case. Still, Chen was fired from her job in 2016. She filed a complaint of discrimination with the Department of Commerce (DoC), under which the National Weather Service is housed, but it was rejected. She was found to be a victim of gross injustice after her prosecution and dismissal. In 2019, Chen filed a civil lawsuit against the DoJ for wrongful prosecution and to seek compensation. And in November 2021, Chen filed a complaint against the DoC for unlawfully investigating and arresting her.

Chen will be having a meeting with the DoC in order to discuss her views on wrongdoing at the agency. The letter from the DoC will acknowledge Chen’s accomplishments as a hydrologist.

“The Commerce Department is finally being held responsible for its wrongdoing,” said Chen in a statement. The DoC did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.

Hu isn’t fighting the US government the same way. The lead prosecutor in Hu’s case was nominated by Biden for the post of US attorney in Tennessee. Hu tried to block the nomination because of his prosecution of Hu despite weak evidence and he felt that Arrowood couldn’t be trusted to apply the law fair and just.

Science and the Cold War: Implications of the COVID-19 Anomaly for the United Nations and for the Reform of the Chinese-US Cooperation Agreement

“This is only the first step towards what genuine accountability looks like,” he says. He says that these apologies mean a lot to the people who have been impacted.

There’s little doubt that 2023 will bring more pressure on international cooperation between scientists and on science-based cooperation to protect the environment and public health. For their part, researchers and their representative organizations need to be more vigilant when this happens, not least because they will be asked to do the heavy lifting. They need to take the time to study what might be asked of them. And they should ask themselves whether they want to participate in science aligned with foreign policy if this leads to weakening of the vast cooperative networks that are necessary for both global science and science-based international treaties.

Although in the summer China temporarily broke off bilateral climate talks with the United States that had been announced at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK, at the end of 2021, these talks are now back on, mainly thanks to long-standing relationships between China’s chief climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, and top US officials such as climate envoy John Kerry and physicist John Holdren. Tensions have also been high between China and Canada over the past few years, but policymakers and researchers from the two countries worked constructively at the COP15 biodiversity summit, which was led by China.

But the COVID-19 pandemic continued to provide textbook examples of nations working in their own interests. The governments of a relatively small number of wealthy countries had already bought and hoarded vaccines from pharmaceutical companies in Europe and the United States (Nature 607, 211–212; 2022). Nature was proud to play a small part in opposing the international campaign urging the sharing of vaccines, therapies and intellectual property. It’s possible that more people in low and middle-income countries would have been given the vaccine if they had listened to the World Health Organization.

By contrast, many non-Western nations have not been isolating Russia. China, India and South Africa are continuing their research cooperation with Russia, as we reported in April (Nature 604, 227–228; 2022). Russia is the Vice-presidency of the Alliance of International Science Organizations, a science cooperation arm of the Belt and Road Initiative. In the last five years, China has invested more than US$900 billion in the initiative, which seeks to build infrastructure in other countries along the original Silk Road route towards the West.

Young Chinese scientists who returned to China after getting their PhDs overseas put out more papers than their peers who stayed abroad. The authors of an analysis published in Science1 think that the productivity increase can be attributed to returnees having access to more funding and a greater research workforce. The findings come as geopolitical competition between the United States and China mounts.

With powerful countries encouraging open markets, rivalry is being seen in trade and technology. The United States restricts sales of US technology to China, which is home to the types of chips used in supercomputing and artificial intelligence. US citizens and residents have been forbidden from working for Chinese technology companies. It also wants countries to partner with itself instead of China, which partly explains its interest in encouraging African countries to become an alternative base for technology cooperation. Last week, China retaliated by lodging a dispute with the World Trade Organization, the body that sets rules for international trade, arguing that the US move is a violation of free-trade rules that both countries have signed up to.

The world is clearly in what economist Pedro Conceição calls “a new uncertainty complex”, with an ongoing pandemic, war, climate risks and associated economic shocks. As a result, there are likely to be more instances of countries raising trade barriers and making moves to protect their economies, and more instance of nations using science and technology towards foreign policy objectives.

Governments have responsibilities to ensure that international cooperation in science-based policies is not corrupted. The next climate summit, referred to as theCOP 28, will take place in the United Arab countries of the United Arab republics.

The migration of scientists in the era of the China Initiative: how much research do researchers spend in China? A new study by Wang, Wang, and Vogel

The study makes an important contribution, says geographer Qingfang Wang at the University of California, Riverside, who researches why scientists — including YTT recipients — migrate. But she notes, on the basis of her investigations, that researchers will apply for YTT funding only once they have decided to relocate to China, so it is unclear how effective the programme is at enticing researchers to the country.

Despite its prestige, government agencies in the United States and elsewhere have regarded the programme with suspicion, because of its potential to increase the flow of technical know-how to China. In 2018, the administration of former US president Donald Trump launched the China Initiative, to protect US laboratories and businesses from espionage. And that same year, the Chinese government stopped publicly naming Thousand Talents Plan recipients because of the negative career impact that the association might have.

The YTT recipients may have to move into leadership roles in order to have an impact on the research culture. But the lack of transparency since 2018 around who receives YTT grants will make it harder to carry out research on later cohorts of the programme — including those who received grants during the height of the China Initiative and the turbulent pandemic era. “It is a pity,” she says.

But they also found that scientists who rejected offers to participate in the programme, and stayed abroad, ranked even higher — in the top 10% for research productivity in the five years before they might have returned. These researchers were also more likely to have published as a last author on papers — which usually denotes seniority — in leading journals. Public-policy researcher Kathleen Vogel at Arizona State University in Tempe thinks that the main reason for these findings is that it’s hard to persuade top-notch researchers to leave elite institutions, where they already have access to funding and resources.

YTT scholars are better able to forge independent research careers than returnees because they are more likely to be last authors, according to Wang.

The main driver of productivity gains is access to funding, and once that is taken into account the effect on publication output disappears. Wang says that research grants really matter.

She says that it is more difficult to measure the value of a scientific programme due to the fact that it focuses on publication output. The aim is not to produce “publication machines”, she adds. Guidelines were issued by the China’s ministries of science and technology and education to reduce institutions’ reliance on publication.

“I’m sorry to say that it has only intensified,” says Gang Chen, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who was arrested in January 2021 under the China Initiative, only for the DoJ to drop the charges a year later. He and other people who have suffered damage from the initiative have been speaking out.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in December of 2022 on an example of the university taking a more active role. The university accused Fu of hiding his ties to China and forced him to quit his position. UCSD said he had violated its conflict-of-commitment policy by accepting travel reimbursements from Chinese institutions that he had visited, and had failed to disclose Chinese grants that bore his name. Fu is not guilty according to the Tribune.

The universities are against the idea that their research is being unfairly targeted. US institutions acknowledge the significant research contributions from these scientists according to Toby Smith, vice-president for science policy and global affairs at the Association of American Universities. He says that universities are trying to make sure that all faculty members are giving accurate information.

But he calls on US funding agencies to provide greater clarity for universities on what counts as an offence and what are appropriate and fair sanctions.

Gisela Kusakawa is the executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum, based in New York City. Universities and agencies should provide training for scientists on how to complete disclosure forms, and they must allow scientists the opportunity to revise completed forms to ensure that they are correct, she says.

The Congress formed a bipartisan committee to assess the economic threats posed by China to the United States. The creation of the committee means that Congress wants to keep a close eye on China’s influence on the scientific enterprise.

Chen is similarly afraid to apply for federal research funding, concerned that the government could misuse the forms against him as they did before, he says. To feel more secure, he has switched from researching nanotechnologies with obvious commercial applications to doing more-fundamental science, exploring the solar evaporation of water. He doesn’t reply to e-mails from researchers and students in China who are interested in his research papers.