China & the US: Safeguarding Open Research Against Authoritarian Rivals
Published February 5, 2024
Distinguished Research Fellow, Glenn Tiffert, warns that the Chinese government strategically exploits the openness of American scientific research to advance its own interests, oftentimes at odds with those of the United States. Intellectual property theft and exposure of state secrets are a significant concern. Rather than enact broad restrictions against working with China, however, the United States must remain an open society and, instead, be more thorough in vetting its partners and use data-based risk assessments to secure the integrity of our research.
Learn More about China's Global Sharp Power Project from The Hoover Institution here!
Check Out More from Glenn Tiffert:
- Read "How China Wields its "Sharp Power"" by Glenn Tiffert. Available here.
- Watch "Countering China's Malign Influence Operations in the United States" (Congressional Testimony) from Glenn Tiffert. Available here.
Check Out More on China from PolicyEd:
>> Glenn Tiffert: There is no nation that is more tightly integrated into the American research enterprise than the People's Republic of China. That's a function of everything it brings to the table, incredible talent, world class facilities, and generous funding. On their merits, researchers in China are people you would want to work with.
Until recently, US researchers and institutions tended to approach this relationship through a narrow transactional lens, whereas the Chinese government was thinking more strategically. It was asymmetrically exploiting the openness of our research enterprise to transfer technology and data and advance values and interests that are in conflict with our own.
Most seriously, hundreds of collaborations were taking place with Chinese researchers who worked in or were associated with China's defense base, including on anti-submarine warfare, hypersonics, and jet engines. There are examples in China of experts in artificial intelligence who do amazing brain science work and work on neurological diseases, but who take the technologies that they develop in those spheres and apply them to technologies of state repression.
So how can we guide people to make informed decisions about whether they should work with a particular partner or in a particular line of research? We need domain experts who study this full time and good data and systems to assess the opportunities and risks in scientific collaboration to answer questions like, who am I collaborating with, really?
How will they apply that research? We must be better versions of ourselves by cultivating a more welcoming environment and by creating secure pathways for the world's talent to contribute to and stay in the United States. Failure to do so only isolates America, weakens our national security, and cedes our strategic advantages to our competitors and rivals.