Flawed policies turn off the knowledge tap

Recognizing the increasingly international dimension to scientific collaboration and China's growing research prowess, scientists are concerned that US policies targeting Chinese researchers have significantly hurt productivity.

"It is internationally collaborative networks and groups that tackle the biggest problems, like climate change, epidemiology and so on," said Jonathan Adams, chief scientist of the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate in England, at a conference organized by the Asia Society Northern California.

"International collaboration is here to stay. China is a very, very big player now in that field. China's research is increasingly high-quality and innovative. It's supported by a lot of resourcing, and there are more and more important discoveries and innovations coming out of that. It would be absurd for us to cut ourselves off from what's happening there."

Chinese research is particularly important in high technology areas, and its collaborators "clearly benefit from that", Adams said.

China is increasingly collaborative with more countries, a case in point is the United States, he said. In fields such as nanosciences and telecommunications, papers co-authored by US and Chinese researchers are more numerous than US domestic papers, he said.

Caroline Wagner, a professor at John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, conducted a study and found China had surpassed the EU in around 2015 and the US in 2019 in producing the top 1 percent of most highly cited articles.

"These are the works that get the greatest attention from other scientific researchers. It means China is at the forefront in terms of capacity to do world-class research."

Collaborative work between China and the US is extremely well cited at the top levels, she said. However, the number of China's collaborations with the US has dropped in recent years.

"We saw the shift down around 2018; at the same time, though, China-EU collaboration continued fairly strongly."

Result of politics

Decreased collaboration could be the result of politics, she said, citing the now-defunct China Initiative program that was established in 2018.

Her findings coincide with the research of Margaret Roberts, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, who co-authored a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper titled "The Impact of US-China Tensions on US Science".

The paper presents how US investigations have affected productivity in life sciences by comparing the publications of scholars who had previously worked with China and those who had engaged in other international collaborations.

After the China Initiative was established there was a decrease in productivity, and the trend has continued, the paper found.

In response to calls for scrutiny of Chinese collaboration over national security or human rights issues, Roberts said, research collaboration between the US and China is "incredibly productive", and most of the joint work is in areas of science and focused on challenges that humanity faces.

However, those highly publicized investigations of Chinese researchers have caused "a big chilling effect", she said, and "there's this perception that any type of collaboration is bad".

"I hope that there could be a lot more clarity (in US government guidance) because I think the lack of clarity around this leads to this chilling effect, and it's more likely to create implicit bias."

To help restore collaboration, Adams said, policymakers should "work out communications" with China.

"At the moment we are not positioning ourselves in a way that optimizes our communication with China because we don't know enough about what they're doing, and that is not because they are hiding. It is because we simply aren't able to ask the right questions.

"What we have to do is to address how we are going to make the best use of that relationship and the benefits it provides, rather than focusing solely on how we control and limit the information flow in the relationship, which is a very negative position to start from."