by Denis Simon

In the September-October issue of AmCham HK e-Magazine, Professor Simon wrote about the cliffhanging fate of the US-China Science & Technology Agreement first signed in 1979, and the importance of reviving it for an era in which China has much more to offer in collaboration on global issues. Here he focuses on Track II dialogues both in S&T and educational exchanges. With the Republican sweep of the presidency and both houses of Congress on November 5, non-governmental organizations may play a crucial role in building trust in both S&T collaboration and educational exchanges. Simon has been involved with a Track II-like dialogue, the US-China Higher Education Dialogue between the Institute of International Education and the China Education Association for International Exchange under the Ministry of Education. It met in September 2023 and October 2024 and will meet again next year in October 2025 in Washington DC.

Where we are now?

The process of globalization has been short circuited, and we’ve entered a period of what you may call “fragmented globalization.” The free flow of people, ideas and information, capital, students and talent – all of that has been interrupted or curtailed to some degree by national security imperatives. These have trumped all the other ways of looking at science and technology as well as education exchanges as effective tools of diplomacy.

This change has occurred across the globe. In the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger talked about the fact that US strength in science and technology was an asset in allowing the United States to have influence around the world. Now, as we see a greater levelling of technological capability around the world, this view has changed. During the first 30 years of the US-China relationship, the US was still the dominant technological power in the world. But now others like China have reached a level of parity with the US, and the US feels that its leadership position is no longer secure.

The idea of sharing, the notion of joint development, now have become objects of second guessing. We probably ought not to share this or that. We probably ought not to transfer this. It’s a very different set of lenses for looking at the world once the primary lens is security.

As S&T has become securitized, it has also become the domain of intense competition, rather than being viewed simply as instruments of development, let’s say, or of economic growth. This is particularly true they involve a potential military application, or evoke a fear that without a leadership role, we compromise  our national security.

Frankly, I simply don’t see it that way, because I don’t believe science and technology are a zero-sum game. It’s just the opposite. The synergies gained from collaboration give us a new mathematics. One plus one equals three, or one plus one plus one even equals even four. The synergies are where the power of collaboration comes from, and restrictions can be taken too far, depriving the world of the benefits that come from cross-border collaboration.

With the second Trump administration only two months away, it is too early to identify what its precise policies will be on S&T and international students, let alone on securing the benefits of S&T as a public good. It is all too likely that whatever the policies of the new administration will be, including policy on S&T collaboration with China, as well as educational exchanges, these two areas will be ringfenced in a way that most likely denies such benefits.

What if, instead of spiralling downwards, we were to acknowledge the benefits through a renewal of the US-China S&T Agreement, as well as efforts to build more trust around educational exchanges? What if we were to go forward, instead of backward to the dark era of Cold War export controls and limited contact between US and Chinese universities?

What does going forward mean? It means that we would begin to identify promising areas of “safe” collaboration and cooperation where Chinese and US scientists and engineers could work; this might include specific projects on climate change, food security, health and medicine and clean energy. In education, similarly, it means drawing up clear roadmaps to avoid future conflicts.

My fear is that if we continue to play a game of “tit for tat” we will continue to move in a downward spiral. My hope is that we already have hit a plateau and somebody in Washington will say, look, there’s no more to be gained by further squeezing this whole area, making it tighter and tighter, and that we ought to look for ways where technology and education cease to be impediments to the improvement of relations, and that, as we thought in 1979 they becomes facilitators.

Why we need Track II dialogues

In an era when diplomacy has become very unpredictable, among the promising currents in US-China relations is “diplomacy without diplomats,” as Track II-type diplomacy has been called. Track I, obviously, is classical diplomacy between nations. Track II diplomacy is where private individuals can find ways to compromise in ways that governments and official negotiations fail. This may be where we are now in two vitally important areas of US-China relations, science and technology and educational exchange.

Track II dialogues are part of a perspective that we ought to keep talking at all levels about as many subjects as possible to maintain some degree of communication and hopefully pre-empt some smaller issues from snowballing into a bigger, more dangerous ones.

As I wrote previously in the AmCham HK e-Magazine, the US-China Science & Technology Agreement expired in 2018 and was extended while negotiations were underway to update it to reflect the new complexities of current US-China relations. Meanwhile, several Track II dialogues are going on in related areas. The National Committee for US-China Relations plays a seminal role. There is a Track Two on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and another on health technologies. These run against the backdrop of discussions going on between the two governments, and sometimes their absence. As the US and China at the official level talk about the use of AI, for example, they are not talking about the joint development of AI, they’re talking about dangerous applications, and the goal of those discussions is to pre-empt some kind of horrific use of the technology for nefarious purposes.

The Track II dialogues on AI, of course, talk about some of that, but their real goal is to try to understand the trajectory of these technologies by bringing the experts together and then trying to assess where new issues might emerge, so that they can pre-empt them from becoming unmanageable. Track II dialogues keep the channels of communication open and help to identify the trouble areas that might not be on the agendas of the working groups between the two governments.

The discussions on health and pandemics have a big upside potential, because scientists in both countries expect there to be another significant pandemic. They are not about who started Covid last time. They are much more about, what would we do if there’s a new pandemic, and anticipatory behaviors and expectations management.  Both countries recognize that we need each other, so let’s begin to identify in a transparent manner what we will do to mobilize together to limit the damaging effects of another pandemic.

There are other kinds of discussions as well. There’s a Track II about national security issues. It would be nice to think that the governments are taking on all these issues and trying to find solutions to them. But let’s not forget that in the “rough and tumble” politics of the relationship, the Track IIs are much less encumbered by the current baggage affecting political leaders, and they’re much freer to have an open-ended, free-wheeling discussion that can hopefully identify issues that could get buried in the morass of political tensions.

Track II in education

I’ve been the orchestrator of a Track II-type dialogue under the auspices of the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the China Education Association for International Exchange under the Ministry of Education. Its purpose is to identify key issues that are affecting the mobility of American students to China and Chinese students to the United States, and the key issues affecting university research. The two sides are trying to put together working groups to come up with actionable items to improve the landscape so that education doesn’t become a casualty in the souring of the bilateral relationship.

The first dialogue met in New York City in September 2023 and involved more than a dozen universities from each country.  The second dialogue was held in October 2024 in Beijing with a similar number of representatives from each side.  We targeted Vice-Provost and Vice-President senior administrators who had considerable experience working with various aspects of bilateral education relations.  Some of the Americans had studied in China, but a larger number of Chinese administrators had studied in the US.  We tackled even the most sensitive issues such as student self-censorship, academic freedom, visa difficulties, and even intellectual property (IP) theft. The conversations were frank and open; we maintained a positive environment so that there was no finger pointing and trust was established early on.  That is why we were able to schedule a third meeting of the dialogue for October 2025 in Washington, DC.

The coming collapse of US-China educational and academic exchanges?

Anybody who follows US-China educational exchanges knows that one of the most vibrant parts of our relationship with China involving education and research has been ethnic Chinese networks. Chinese-Americans, Chinese-Germans and Chinese-British have built these networks in collaboration with their counterparts back in China. They have produced a large number of jointly authored publications, many in top-tier, refereed journals. Of course, research collaboration also has involved non-Chinese on the US side which has also been very productive.

We’ve already seen a precipitous decline in activities across these networks post-Covid because the China Initiative went into place. This was a program launched by the US Department of Justice in 2018 to prosecute perceived Chinese spies in research and industry. After leading to at least one suicide, costing about 250 jobs, mostly of Chinese-Americans, and contributing to a rise in anti-Asian violence, it was finally shut down in 2022. In 2019, Covid came, and in 2020, literally all travel to China was shut down. And what we find is that the networks have not been renewed. Nor have many new ones emerged, particularly at public universities.

If you believe that one of the bedrock elements of the bilateral relationship was the relationship in education, this is a very serious situation. The irony is that areas like science and technology and education, which once were the bedrock, foundational elements in the relationship, now have become a source of conflict.

State universities in the United States are particularly nervous. For one, the State Department has categorized China as a Category 3 country for its travel advisory service, which says: “Don’t go if you don’t have to go.” Then there is the fact that US universities don’t want to be accused of being too chummy with China, which I call the Chummy Index. If you score too high on the Chummy Index, you could be denied federal funding. I don’t know of any specific legislation that authorizes a Chummy Index or that specifies what would happen. Nonetheless, if you talk to senior university administrators, and particularly if you talk to Senior Research Officers (SROs) on US campuses, they will tell you that everyone knows they could be disenfranchised from federal funding if they’re seen as too close to the Chinese.

Finally, state legislatures trying to be in tune with their congressmen and women and their senators don’t want to get too close to China in order not to damage the state-level funding that public universities depend on. They might like to collaborate with China as part of their effort to become international or global universities, but because of the prevailing political climate, they can’t do it without looking over their shoulder.

As I’ve noted, we’ve seen a decline in research collaboration, a decline in return to old projects, and a decline in the startup of new projects. We’ve seen a reduction of the number of Chinese students coming to the United States from over 370,000 in 2019 to 290,000 in 2023, and the expectation is that the number will continue to go down this year, when the new data comes out from IIE. We’ve also seen a drastic decline in the number of American students willing to go to China.

This is particularly damaging. I’m not a young man anymore, and I will at some point decide to retire from this game. And so will a generation of people who grew up and were trained in the mid-1970s and early-1980s. We don’t know if we will have a sufficient number of young people who are doing what we did 40 years ago, when we were graduate students, to become the next cohort of China specialists, and that means people who have language skills and people who have spent time on the ground in China, interacting with their Chinese counterparts, whether they’re students or officials or business people. We need more points of interface with China coming from the American side, because we will not have people who really understand China in the future.

Pre-Covid in 2011 we had a peak of almost 15,000 American students in China.  Post-Covid, in 2022, the first year after China’s Zero Covid restrictions were lifted, we had 350 American students in China. Some people think we may have crossed the 1,000-student line in 2023, but we’re not anywhere near the number that we need, to generate a future cohort of Sinologists or people who know how to negotiate in China, people who know how to communicate. As friend or foe, we need trained experts who understand multiple aspects of China.

This not only includes things like, military strategy or Chinese politics, it includes art, literature, social sciences as well as the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields as well. Across the board, the relationship has been seriously damaged, and we badly need a clearer road map that specifies what we can do and what we cannot do.  We also need something akin to a campaign called, “Study abroad in China! It’s safe, it’s fun and it’s enjoyable!” Don’t forget, we’re talking to 18-to-22-year-olds.

We’re not talking about 45-year-olds, though, again, even a hefty percentage of people in mid-career who used to go to China regularly are now sceptical about going or hesitant because of the new data security, national security and cyber security laws in China. These laws have been described as opaquer than they ought to be in terms of specifying the do’s and don’ts, so nobody does something wrong unintentionally and gets in trouble. There is an uneasiness that we really don’t fully understand the application of these laws because they don’t have enough specificity. They follow the Chinese approach in policy making of “purposeful ambiguity.” The Chinese government does not know how these laws may be implemented from province to province, and what kind of distortions might or might not occur, or what kind of problems might happen that they didn’t anticipate.

They’re left purposely vague in many cases, but now I think we have entered negotiations with the STA about how we can get to having shared norms about some of these things so we can go back to having our students and their parents feel comfortable about sending their kids to China.  The same holds for Chinese students and scholars coming to US.  If you re-visit the last 40 years of exchanges for students and scholars from both countries, it’s quite clear that the large majority, perhaps 98%, went abroad primarily to further their education and enhance their career prospects.

How to make studying in China fun again

How to persuade American students to go to China is a burning question. I will tell you that to a T, Chinese universities are welcoming to American students. And when they talk about their welcome mat, they include high-quality living conditions with dorms, access to university cafeterias, and if you don’t like what they have, you have McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks. (Of course, there also is fantastic Chinese food). They have English-speaking professors, so you don’t have to be fluent in Chinese. And they have also arrangements for sightseeing to the famous places in China.

If you go to Beijing Normal University, you know they’re going to take you to the Great Wall, the Ming tombs, and the Temple of Heaven. It’s great, but 18-to-20-year-old Americans need Internet access because their smartphones are glued to their hands. They must be able to communicate, not only with their family, but with all their friends and send WhatsApp texts, ‘Here I am in a coffee shop in the middle of Shanghai, and there’s a beautiful girl there’, or a handsome guy or whatever.

Students should be the chief marketing agents of the of the idea of studying in China. There’s a program now in place called the YES program, the Young Envoy Scholarship program. This is the implementation mechanism for Xi Jinping’s invitation to have 50,000 American students come to China over five years. Remarkably, since Xi Jinping made the announcement in November of 2023, the YES Program has brought over 12,000 American students to China. Most of them are on short, two-to-three-week trips, and they’ve included high school students as well as college students and even some early career people in their in their numbers.

The idea is, if these groups have a good experience, when they come back, they can tell their friends that this place called China is rather interesting. And one of the things that those young people will notice, and this is a continuing consequence of globalization, that Chinese young people, 18-to-22-year-olds, wear the same clothes as their American counterparts, listen to much of the same music, watch the same movies, and eat a lot of the same food. In other words, they have a lot in common.

The YES Program has turned out to be very, very good. It’s under the aegis of the China Education Association for International Exchange under the Ministry of Education. These are a bunch of hard-working, well-meaning people. In my opinion, the big problem is on the US side, namely, we don’t have a counterpart agency. We don’t have a coordinating mechanism to play the role of bringing together different groups of American students for focused programs on topics of shared interest.

One of the ideas has been that we need to reach out to American students who are not necessarily interested in traditional Asian Studies, in Chinese art or literature, but want to understand China’s role regarding evolving global challenges – what’s going on in China with climate change, what’s going on in China with the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. They want to be able to understand China’s place in the world through having meaningful learning experiences in China.

Yes, they can learn some Chinese culture and some Chinese history, but their goal is much more contemporary. Looking forward, we think that there’s a powerful new cohort that is yet to be fully tapped that could provide a pipeline of students into China and hopefully have a very positive experience, making study in China into a kind of brand, and having it sold by previous students through the YES Program, as ambassadors for studying in China.

There’s also a financial reality that Chinese students pay full tuition and spend money in their local communities in the US. They literally contribute billions and billions of dollars to the US economy every year. Education is a major export for the United States. It’s our fourth largest export, and so it’s very concerning when I keep hearing stories that post-Covid, several colleges and universities have lost dozens and even hundreds of Chinese students. Now, you can imagine, for some of these small liberal arts colleges, the evaporation of 550 full tuitions, that full tuition is a big amount of money to lose. Fortunately, with programs such as YES, the Chinese side is willing to absorb most of the local costs for US students and they have been working with the Chinese airlines to secure discount fares to make such visits viable.

Finally, there is a study abroad dimension. China has been a very welcoming place for international students. It has steadily improved its academic offerings for these students from abroad.  But if it’s painted with a kind of black brush by some in Washington DC or in the media, we lose a very good target country for training, whether it’s in the humanities or social science, and now increasingly important in STEM fields as well.

Teaching our students that this is not a cookie-cutter world

This is partly a question of values. We’re an open society, China is a managed society. There’s a responsibility on both sides of the ocean. We need a code of conduct that will support our scholarly and student exchanges. We need to have every student and scholar on both sides sign a commitment to this code of conduct. And the basic code of conduct is that they will not intentionally break the law or violate the spirit of the law.

In joint venture universities in China, where I lived on campus at Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu for five years, you could even say, down with the fearless leader inside the campus walls. Once you got off the campus grounds, however, you were no longer protected. Within their campuses, the joint venture universities generally have traditional American-style academic freedom, but even there, it’s a question of good judgement. You’re in another country that doesn’t share all the same norms and values of the United States.

As someone who has been engaged with China for over four decades, it’s not a bad idea to teach our students that the world is not the United States, and that we’re not going to get everyone to be like the US. What does a society look like that has different norms and values? Can you have innovation in a country that is not a democracy? And the evidence is that you can. To me, it’s all about whether the governments of both countries provide a decent quality of life as well as attractive  and safe work opportunities for their citizens. Surely, there are trade-offs. Our young people need to gain a deeper appreciation for such different situations.

In contrast to what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets suggested, the Chinese case proves that economic growth doesn’t necessarily result in political liberalization. But that doesn’t mean we should not cooperate with China. That doesn’t mean that China doesn’t have any creative people. It just means that their value proposition is different than ours. Through the whole period of hardening relations with the US, Xi Jinping has maintained an open-door policy and the goal of international engagement. He realizes that China has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of globalization and thus even the midst of a sharply changing external environment, he shows no sign of wanting to shut the door.

What do we have to gain by moving forward?

Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, China was an innovation laggard. It was not playing a prominent role or a leadership role in S&T. Yes, there were a few people here and there, but as a country, it was weak. It was very much a teacher-student relationship, between China and the US. Now the asymmetries are gone. The hierarchy has largely disappeared, and we’re close to parity in many important fields, even some where China is in the lead.

What do we have to gain? Mutual benefit can become a meaningful concept. If we were to disengage, we would deny ourselves access to China at the very moment when China’s growing pool of brainpower could contribute to the solution of pressing global issues such as climate change and global pandemics. We would not only be doing that, but also would be sending a message about the global integration of science, that we were comfortable with one of the biggest emerging players being relegated to the margins.

This is why I think the Europeans and the Japanese are not as eager for the kind of disengagement that the US has described. Even though we use the term de-risking these days, this really is a game of quid pro quo. We must understand that where China was sitting at the back of the table a few years ago, now it is front and center at that same table. And by bringing more to the table, it commands a voice at that table. Unfortunately, what we’re achieving right now is the bifurcation of global science; we see some of that already in China’s work with Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries where it’s using science diplomacy to bring China and these countries into the same community.

In a world order in which China, Russia and the (BRICS) bloc of countries (Brazil, India, China and South Africa, now in the process of expanding the list) have a kind of working alliance, we will start to get more fragmentation in global science. That is not good for anybody.  Everything from research protocols to technical standards and metrics will be affected. Let’s not forget, because of their engagement with the US, China’s National Natural Science Foundation was modelled after the US National Science Foundation.  There are many other such examples such as China’s shift away from the Soviet model for university development.  Today, Chinese universities are heavily engaged in research along with teaching, something garnered from their exposure to America’s R1 comprehensive research institutions, a designation for universities that go beyond teaching to ground-breaking research.

In the recent US-China Higher Education Dialogue in Beijing in October 2024, both sides were seeking a more clearly defined and transparent roadmap of areas that would remain open and areas that might remain tight or even closed. We need some specificity so that each side is not operating in the dark, that we have some sense of technological collaboration, and clarity about those areas where the two countries could work together.

My big worry is not just that downward spiral I previously mentioned, but that the situation will get even worse before it gets better. If it does get much worse before it gets better, it means that the time to recover, the time to put things back to a normal, stable relationship will become longer, perhaps as long as 10 years. Yes, there are risks regarding both science and technology and education cooperation but let’s be careful not to over-exaggerate the risks – many of which are manageable – while ignoring the potential benefits and win-win upside! 

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