In online spaces where Chinese students and researchers congregate, complaints about the state of scientific research in China abound. Online censorship makes accessing international research resources difficult; universities lack mechanisms to address sexual harassment by senior scientists; there is widespread corruption in grant-making processes; and scientists are being forced to attend classes on “Xi Jinping Thought.”
These are among the reasons why, every year, many of China’s best and brightest flock to the United States to study and build careers in America’s relatively open, free, and transparent environment for science and technology research. (There is no database of all domestic and international students in the United States, but it’s likely that more than 200,000 undergraduate and graduate students from China come to the U.S. each year to study STEM subjects.) Many will eventually become American citizens and raise families in the United States. “Our Nation [sic] leads global scientific progress by example, promoting core principles of freedom of inquiry, scientific integrity, collaboration, and openness,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) under the first Trump Administration.
However, in recent years, the U.S. government has taken steps to restrict that openness—some for good reason. According to U.S. intelligence agencies and independent research, U.S. federal research funding has helped advance Chinese technologies with military applications, and the Chinese government and military also benefit from extensive industrial espionage by the Chinese government. Such espionage is not only undertaken by professional intelligence agents. U.S. intelligence officials also worry that due to the tight control China’s government exerts over Chinese citizens, Chinese people or those with family members back in China are vulnerable to coercion and might not be able to refuse if Beijing asks them to gather intelligence.
In the past year, I have participated in various private and public discussions about this issue, including the National Science, Technology, and Security Roundtable at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), where senior leaders in the scientific and national security entities convene to explore solutions. While the national security and scientific communities have made significant progress in forging mutual understanding, I have been concerned by the lack of focus on the rights and freedoms of the people who are most affected by the changing policies, namely Chinese scientists and researchers studying and working in the U.S. The narrow focus on “national security” risks undermining American freedom—as well as security—in the long run.
There have already been missteps. The China Initiative is an example. Launched in 2018 by the Department of Justice under the Trump Administration to prosecute economic espionage of national security significance, the program lacked the guardrails necessary to ensure its efficacy, and quickly drifted to targeting scientists of Chinese origin for relatively minor violations of grant disclosure rules. While the initiative achieved some notable convictions (such as that of Harvard University chemist Charles Lieber), some key criminal prosecutions the initiative generated were dismissed before trial or ended in acquittal due to a lack of evidence (such as the cases of Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Gang Chen and University of Kansas chemist Feng Tao).
The financial and reputational costs for those targeted for prosecution have been ruinous and the emotional toll long-lasting. Tao of University of Kansas had to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars from family in China and members of his church in Kansas to pay legal fees. “I am still often woken up by my wife’s cries in her dreams as she remembers the police shouting beside her bed that morning I was arrested,” Chen of MIT said three years after his ordeal.
U.S. law enforcement’s conduct in one program affects the effectiveness of its other endeavors. The FBI has been working to address the Chinese government’s efforts to silence its critics abroad, including engaging in outreach to diaspora groups that may be targeted. Freedom House, however, found that FBI involvement in the China Initiative, which included agents speaking on campuses about the proper way to report foreign ties, made Chinese students more wary of contacting law enforcement to report transnational repression from the Chinese authorities.
In early 2022, the Biden Administration ended the China Initiative, saying it had created a “harmful perception” of bias against people with “racial, ethnic, or familial ties to China.” According to a report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the termination of the China Initiative “lessened” but did not “fully expunge” the chill felt by ethnic Chinese and other Asian-American students and faculty.
While the Biden Administration deserves credit for ending the China Initiative, the U.S. government’s newer programs have generated fresh criticism. Researchers have found that instead of targeting prominent academics already in the U.S., the government is now increasingly questioning and turning back Ph.D. and postdoctoral students from China at airports. This type of border policing may be based on Presidential Proclamation 10043, a May 2020 policy intended to counter China’s military-civil fusion strategy by restricting access to the United States for researchers connected to unnamed PRC institutions engaged in the strategy. Customs and Border Protection agents are taking actions against Chinese travelers without public oversight or accountability. And unlike those facing prosecution in U.S. courts, the people denied entry have few legal avenues to contest these decisions.
The increasing atmosphere of mistrust in the U.S. is widely discussed among Chinese people considering studying and working in the U.S. On 1 Point 3 Acres, a Chinese-language website catering to overseas Chinese, I found dozens of posts by Chinese students telling stories of being barred from boarding flights to the U.S., having their visas revoked by Customs agents, being paid visits by the FBI on campus, or learning that job offers had been rescinded. While I did not independently verify these accounts, the feelings of helplessness, fear, anger, and pain were palpable. One student who said their visa was revoked after returning to China for vacation wrote, “I have done absolutely nothing, but have become a victim of geopolitical gaming…[I] just can’t accept this ending.” “We cannot get back what we have experienced and lost, the hurt will be buried quietly with the passing of time,” a Ph.D. graduate who said her job offer at a national lab had been rescinded for unknown reasons lamented. “I feel deeply that we are just grains of sand tossed around by this moment in time. Our destiny is out of our control.”
At the same time, while some universities have rightly spoken up for their faculty and students, and pushed back at the U.S. government’s efforts to restrict academic freedom on their campuses, they have done little when the Chinese government has reached across borders to suppress the freedoms of Chinese students and scholars.
Freedom House research shows China’s government poses a major threat to international students and scholars studying and working in the U.S. Chinese authorities and their affiliates have harassed and intimidated Chinese students and scholars for speaking critically of Beijing. Some students interviewed by Freedom House reported that their classroom discussions were surveilled and relayed to staff at the Chinese embassy. Others said Chinese authorities interrogated them about their activities in the U.S. when they returned to China, or that their families were harassed when the students were still in the U.S. Yet most universities fell short in addressing Beijing’s transnational repression, formulating responses reactively and on an ad hoc basis, sometimes even counterproductively.
As tension between the U.S. and China continues to rise, some Chinese researchers and scientists studying and working in the U.S. told me that they have increasingly found themselves in an impossible position. On the one hand, they fear being approached by Chinese intelligence officers who can coerce them into disclosing their activities in the U.S. and handing over proprietary information. If they dissent, agents of the Chinese government can silence them by targeting their families back in China, or even by threatening them in the U.S. On the other hand, they also say they are fearful of being approached by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officers who may suspect them of cooperating with Chinese intelligence. One established scientist working in a U.S. laboratory told me, “I just don’t go back to China anymore. I don’t want trouble from either side.”
Balancing scientific collaboration and national security is necessary, but it needs to be accomplished in a way that respects the rights of legitimate students and scientists. The not-so-distant history of excesses in anticommunist and antiterrorist crackdowns in the U.S. shows that, if not managed carefully, efforts to root out “Chinese spies” could spiral into long-lasting damage to American society as a whole.
Building trust with the Chinese scientist and researcher community—and the Chinese diaspora community at large—is critical to the success of any efforts to combat Beijing’s espionage activities. Though counterintelligence officers have made efforts to identify espionage threats, the Chinese scientists I have spoken to do not feel that officials have made an effort to build trust with scientists and understand their lives in the U.S. If Chinese scientists and researchers see U.S. authorities as knowledgeable, just, and accountable, they will be much more willing to report transnational repression and attempts at espionage.
Placing trust in people and keeping a system open and free has inherent risks. Inevitably, Beijing will succeed in exploiting America’s tradition of academic openness in some ways. But the United States must not lose sight of the bigger picture. It should remain confident that the overwhelming majority of people from China studying and working in the United States are here because the country gives them a better life, and that they want to take part in and contribute to America’s freedom and prosperity, not undermine it. Those people’s experience of freedom in the U.S., in turn, can contribute to their support for democracy for Chinese people by showing that there is an alternative to the repressive system of the Chinese Communist Party. In the struggle between democratic and authoritarian systems, democracies must rely on the strength of their openness.
In 2023, a Chinese student said in an online post that she had been awarded a full scholarship to a Ph.D. program in chemistry at a U.S. university but was then refused a visa at the American consulate in Guangzhou because she had attended a Chinese university on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List. “[I] walked out of the consulate crying. That feeling, my friends,” she wrote. The American consulate might have acted in accordance with the law, but it shattered a Chinese person’s “American dream” before she even came to the U.S.