Amid heightened U.S.-China strategic and technology competition, bilateral scientific collaboration has become increasingly challenging. China’s broad military-civil fusion and espionage efforts have heightened Washington’s concerns that any collaboration could be exploited to advance Beijing’s military development. China’s increasingly closed information environment has also exacerbated doubts around whether the results and benefits of collaboration will be properly shared.
In this environment, the renewal on Dec. 13 of the two countries’ long-standing science and technology agreement (STA) was an important step toward stabilizing the bilateral scientific relationship. While a lapse of the STA might have had modest immediate impact, prominent scientists noted that canceling the agreement would have sent a damaging signal. The recently amended STA, with added guardrails in place to address national security and reciprocity concerns, provides space for continued beneficial scientific cooperation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while also resisting pressure for decoupling.
The U.S.-PRC Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology, signed in 1979, was the first major agreement between the two countries after the normalization of diplomatic relations. Since that STA’s signing more than four decades ago, the two governments have renewed it roughly every five years, most recently during the first Trump administration, which added a new section to the agreement in an effort to strengthen intellectual property rights protections.
The 2024 changes to the STA strengthen researcher protections, reciprocity on data-sharing, and accountability for continued government-to-government scientific cooperation. The amended agreement embodies the outgoing Biden administration’s “de-risking” of relations with China. The goal was to set clear guardrails around science and technology cooperation, especially in areas that could aid China’s military, while not seeking to decouple scientific progress that could damage not only the United States’ research and innovation, but also the lives of its citizens. The revised STA is a good reminder that, with the right controls in place, scientific cooperation with China can still provide important benefits.
The STA does not mandate any cooperation. Instead, it is an umbrella agreement that sets consistent terms and protections for U.S. science agencies that pursue cooperative arrangements with their Chinese counterparts, such as joint projects or memorandums of understanding.
Cooperation under the STA has benefited the U.S. in a number of areas, including advances in maternal nutrition, earthquake prediction, the collection of influenza data for vaccine development, more timely and accurate air quality data, and agricultural pest management practices that helped avert significant crop losses.
Just as importantly, continued scientific engagement provides visibility on scientific research in China—visibility that the United States might lose if research collaboration were to be cut off. China now conducts world-leading research in a range of scientific areas, which are important for the United States to stay up to date on for its own scientific advances.
The STA has also benefited China through specific projects in HIV/AIDS prevention, child health, flood control, and climate change monitoring, among other areas, and more broadly in establishing collaboration with leading U.S. institutions. China’s leadership, concerned about losing such linkages, made extending the agreement a priority. Speaking a few days after the renewal in December, a spokesperson from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs cited the STA renewal as “an important step in implementing the consensus reached during the China-U.S. presidential meeting” while Chinese state media touted benefits “for both nations and the world” in continued bilateral scientific research collaboration.
This is the first major rewrite since the STA was originally signed. The agreement has been updated to be more consistent with current issues as well as to account for the state of U.S.-China relations. Changes include provisions emphasizing the importance of researcher safety and well-being; a practical dispute resolution mechanism to address implementation concerns, which replaces an outdated high-level Joint Commission on Science and Technology; and multiple sections on transparency and data-sharing.
Before the negotiations started, the biggest concerns for U.S. and global researchers were data-sharing, transparency, and integrity. China has what is arguably the world’s strictest set of overlapping laws and regulations limiting cross-border data flows, which makes international collaboration increasingly fraught. For example, foreign researchers collaborating with Chinese counterparts can face difficulty exporting or accessing data from joint projects to anywhere outside of China.
If they do export data out of China, foreign and Chinese researchers alike could face challenges—including the risk of arrest—or other unpredictable enforcement of relevant data laws and regulations, which focus on controlling “important data,” a term that is used in China’s data laws, but insufficiently defined. China’s move in April 2023 to limit international access to its primary academic database (known as CNKI), particularly for scientific conference proceedings and dissertations, raised broader concerns on China’s commitment to open science.
A new section in the STA seeks to address these concerns with commitments around data management, access, and transparency. Skeptics may question whether strengthened provisions will truly address the long-standing data issues with China that have built up over several years. But Beijing, acting largely out of concerns that its data regime was damaging its business environment, took steps in the right direction at the same time as the agreement was being renegotiated; in March 2024, Chinese authorities announced important—if incomplete—progress on relaxing some of their onerous and self-damaging restrictions on sharing data.
The STA negotiation provided an opportunity for the United States to push on these adjustments to China’s data regime, including clarification around implementation and how these changes will be applied to scientific collaboration. The new dispute resolution mechanism can be used to provide more accountability, with provisions for U.S. researchers to cease cooperation if their Chinese counterparts do not reciprocate. Data-sharing issues are common in joint research with China, and this mechanism will not solve all these problems—but it’s welcome progress that should also benefit nongovernmental researchers.
The STA has been a source of controversy, particularly with some members of the U.S. Congress, including within the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, who argue that research shared under the agreement could support China’s military modernization.
These criticisms are misplaced. Officials across the U.S. executive branch and Congress—and from both parties—are clear-eyed about China’s broad-ranging efforts to leverage civilian, commercial, and academic research for military and defense purposes, and the threat that this poses to U.S. national security. This naturally circumscribes the scope for cooperation, and Washington has been clear that the STA does not support any cooperation on critical and emerging technologies.
Before any proposed cooperation under the STA is allowed to proceed, it is subject to an internal risk-benefit review, including on national security risks. The Biden administration strengthened this processto ensure any national security risks are sufficiently considered and addressed.
Members of Congress and national security experts have expressed additional concerns—unrelated to the STA, though sometimes conflated with it—around broader Chinese access to U.S. labs and universities. These are being addressed through separate research security efforts. In July, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy published new “Guidelines for Research Security Programs” at U.S. institutes and universities that receive significant federal funding—highlighting national security risks from China and its exploitation of international scientific collaboration while preserving the United States’ openness.
But there is clearly more work to do in protecting U.S. labs. Universities have made progress in their own research security efforts, however, and the National Science Foundation announced new funding in July to establish a national center and five regional centers to share risks, training, and best practices across higher education.
The amended U.S.-PRC STA can serve as a useful reference and model for other countries in their efforts to “de-risk” science and technology cooperation with China. China’s Ministry of Science and Technology reports that China has 115 intergovernmental science and technology agreements, some of which are being updated or renegotiated. Other countries would likely maintain science and technology agreements with China regardless of whether the U.S.-PRC STA had lapsed. But the strengthened STA language, as well as bolstered national security protections on which U.S. officials have engaged international counterparts, will be more helpful in providing well-considered guardrails for other U.S. partners to emulate or draw from than if Washington had just shut down science and technology cooperation with China.
U.S. officials will emphasize publicly—as they should—that the STA only covers government-to-government cooperation, but there is ample scope for beneficial cooperation outside of government channels. The indirect impact of the agreement and its renewal extends more broadly—both symbolically and tangibly. A U.S. life scientist not in government described the STA to one of us in an off-the-record discussion as a “normative umbrella” that benefits researchers in the United States and China more broadly.
The STA establishes clear and consistent best practices that nongovernmental actors can follow in bilateral cooperation. For example, the guidelines and commitments on data-sharing can be pointed to by U.S. and Chinese researchers alike if they are facing obstacles in the Chinese system on sharing data and results from projects outside of China.
Cancer research is one crucial area where everyone benefits. Together, China and the United States account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s 10 million annual cancer deaths. Better harmonization of clinical trials of cancer therapies could reduce global cancer-related deaths by an estimated 10 percent to 20 percent, or 1 million to 2 million lives per year, according to a Bloomberg International Cancer Coalition study.
While geopolitics may seem daunting, history offers a powerful lesson: In 1966, during the height of the Cold War, U.S. scientist Donald Henderson and a Soviet deputy health minister joined forces to eradicate smallpox, which had killed approximately 300 million people in the 20th century alone. By 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eliminated worldwide.
If this kind of cooperation was possible then, there is every reason to believe that the United States and China can come together now to fight cancer. The amended STA provides renewed space for fruitful collaboration in areas that may prove to be lifesaving for both Chinese and Americans.
This post was originally published on here
