China, U.S. called on to collaborate

Aerial photo taken on Dec 5, 2021 shows the sunrise scenery of the Yangpu international container port at Yangpu economic development zone in South China's Hainan province. (Photo/Xinhua)

Decoupling will undermine ability to tackle shared challenges in science, experts say

Scientific and technological decoupling between China and the United States will reduce academic output, disrupt the global innovation system and undermine the ability of their scientific communities to jointly explore new frontiers and tackle shared challenges, experts and scientists said.

The scientific strengths and resources of China and the U.S. are highly complementary in many disciplines, and scientists from both countries should maintain mutually beneficial cooperation despite obstacles posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and political pressure from the U.S. government, they added.

An article published on May 30 in the journal Nature said that the number of scholars who declared affiliations on research papers in both China and the U.S. had dropped by more than 20 percent over the past three years.

The number of papers that were collaborations between authors in the U.S. and China also fell for the first time last year, the journal said, adding that papers with co-authors from China and the European Union did not see such a decline.

Scholars said that the waning cooperation was partly the result of restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also political tensions, characterized by the U.S. Department of Justice's now defunct China Initiative, a policy launched in 2018 to target U.S. academics over fears of "espionage".

U.S. legislators have pushed bills, including the America Competes Act of 2022 and the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, that contain stronger provisions to compete with China on various fronts ranging from technologies to national security.

As a result, the legislative proposals have recently rekindled debate on the possibility of scientific and technological decoupling between two of the world's biggest scientific and economic powers.

Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, told Nature that "if the United States stops collaborating with China, we're cutting off our access to a huge part of what's going on in the scientific world".