Hostile rhetoric toward China is easy to find in Donald Trump’s speeches. There’s lots of talk about them “ripping us off” and “raiding our factories.”
But UC San Diego professor of public policy and innovation David Victor said the mistrust toward China is bipartisan.
Victor is co-author of a commentary about that mistrust in the journal Nature, written with senior scientists in China and the U.S.
He said it’s already affected the two countries’ vital academic cooperation, with a sharp drop in American students studying in China and a reduction in co-authorship of scientific papers.
Victor said both sides need to cool the rhetoric and clearly identify safe zones for joint research, where scholars need not be concerned about impacts on national security.
“We need a strategy for that. Right now there’s nobody providing that kind of guidance. What we argue in the paper is that the U.S. National Academy for Sciences along with its counterpart in China could help offer that strategy,” Victor said.
Life science research is often co-authored by Americans and Chinese. Victor said renewable energy is another field of cooperation. He adds that restricted areas that could affect national security and American industry include Artificial Intelligence, advanced computing and anything related to military technology.
Even as co-authored papers between the U.S. and China have been reduced in recent years, they far outnumber shared research between the U.S. and any other country, including the UK and Japan, as shown in Victor’s Nature article.
That strong academic link between the two counties is seen in many other ways, and American academics fear that rising tensions may cause China to radically reduce the number of graduate students they send to American universities.
Victor said that could be disastrous.
“The U.S. higher education system and the whole academic research enterprise depends very heavily on immigration and notably immigration from China. So that’s going to be another area where we’re going to be watching very closely,” Victor said.
He adds that he’d like to also see philanthropic foundations step in to fund joint research involving Chinese and American scientists.
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