Scientific collaboration between China and US key to tackling climate change, experts say
- President Xi told Politburo more joint scientific research on global issues is key to solving common development challenges
- The US has been China’s biggest research partner, but geopolitical tensions have been hindering cooperation
The two countries agreed to resume dialogue three months later, and global warming is now one of China’s top priorities when it comes to international scientific collaboration.
Xi said strengthening basic research was the key to making China a global science and technology power, and international cooperation and open sharing were more important than ever for a world tackling common development challenges.
25:44
‘China is a frenemy’: Neil deGrasse Tyson on space race | Talking Post with Yonden Lhatoo
“We should plan forward and deepen our involvement in global science and technology governance, join or set up international science and technology organisations, and support universities, research institutes and scientific organisations to connect with the international community,” he said.
Zeng Zhenzhong, an associate professor in the school of environmental science and engineering at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, said climate change was a common challenge that required scientific collaboration between the United States and China.
“Climate change is mainly caused by greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “Without either China and the US, the world’s two largest economies and emitters, any efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change would hardly bear fruit.”
Zeng, who joined SUST in 2019 after three years of postdoctoral research at Princeton University in the US, said scientists from both countries complemented each other in their study of data and technological prowess.
“The US has advanced technologies and experience in satellite remote sensing, earth system simulation and data sharing, while China has its own unique strengths in environmental governance and control, and the development and utilisation of new energy,” he said.
China’s Communist Party looks to science cadres to push back at US tech squeeze
Zeng said there had been restrictions on exchanges and some interference encountered when applying for joint research projects, but many projects, especially on global environmental governance, remained unaffected.
“Science knows no country,” he said. “Cooperation on global warming between China and the US should go beyond borders.
“Scientists from both countries can promote understanding and trust as well as ease tensions through cooperation, playing an important role in China-US relations.”
Geopolitical tensions between the US and China have grown in recent years, including acrimony over the search for the origins of the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic and the tech war, which started as a trade dispute but then extended into a battle for leadership in core technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence and semiconductors.
While Xi’s speech did not single out any countries as targets for scientific collaboration, China’s biggest research partner has been the US, with other top collaborators including Britain, Australia and Canada.
Thai innovation hub helps China step up scientific collaboration
The number of China-US co-publications peaked at nearly 65,400 in 2020, but declined the next year and last year, when it was around 62,000.
Anders Karlsson, vice-president of global strategic networks (Asia-Pacific) at Elsevier, said the slight decrease “does not support a full decoupling between the two nations for the simple reason that both are global research titans and each other’s largest collaborators”.
Scientists from the two countries have been working together in fields including health and medicine, climate change, space exploration, artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as battery technologies, according to the co-publication data.
In the US, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defence and the National Institutes of Health directed nearly US$30 million to science institutions in mainland China and Hong Kong for research collaborations between 2015 and 2021, according to a report issued by the US Government Accountability Office in September.
“At the same time, both the US and China are broadening research collaborations to other nations, both developed as well as emerging nations,” Karlsson said.
Chinese minister’s trip to US a sign of collaboration on climate
“As more nations get a stronger science base, there is a healthy interest amongst research-intensive nations to continue deepening and broadening science collaborations in particular to solve global challenges such as disease outbreaks, climate change and global health as well as supporting fundamental research, such as in CERN – the European Organisation for Nuclear Research – or other infrastructure collaborations.”
He said science diplomacy could keep some bilateral exchange channels open when other doors were shut, pointing to the Cold War era scientific collaboration programmes between the US and the former Soviet Union, such as a 1975 project to dock an American spacecraft with a Soviet capsule.
“While science diplomacy is viewed as a means to support collaborations of common interests to achieve common good, diplomacy can also potentially be used to restrict collaborations if it’s perceived to go against national interests, such as around national security,” he said, pointing to technologies used for both civilian and military applications.
“Funders and universities are developing guidelines for responsible internationalisation,” he said of ways to promote trust in scientific collaborations to address global needs and challenges. “Co-funded programmes [like those between the US and Chinese CDCs] are a tool for trust and to keep doors open.”
Bradley Jolliff, director of the McDonnell Centre for the Space Sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis, who has been working with Chinese scientists who specialise in rock dating for nearly two decades, said geopolitical tensions and the pandemic had made travelling between the two countries difficult for researchers.
“When we travel to China or host Chinese colleagues, we are careful to never use Nasa funds and also to not use Nasa funds for any research expenses,” he said, referring to restrictions under the Wolf Amendment introduced in 2011 in the US. It prohibits Nasa from engaging in direct collaboration with the Chinese government or any China-affiliated organisations without special permission from Congress.
“With our Beijing colleagues, we are also careful to always participate in multinational collaborations, not bilateral.”
The study of the moon and Mars, which involved analysing samples, remote sensing and in situ exploration with rovers, was “truly international”, he said. But the vigorous space exploration programmes run by the US and China set them apart from the rest of the world.
US-China collaboration in AI papers drops amid tech war
“Our community can set a great example of international diplomacy through scientific cooperation,” Jolliff said, adding that research teams included members from the European Space Agency, Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, India and other countries.
“I find [the Chinese scientists I know] much like any of my other international scientist colleagues,” he said. “We are all science nerds and they, like me, are dedicated to wanting to better understand the natural phenomena we can see and measure in the labs or explore on another planet with remote sensing or surface exploration.”
Jolliff said it would be ideal for Nasa and the China National Space Administration to come up with a cooperative agreement, which could also include space agencies in Europe, Japan and India.
“On the Chinese side, the CNSA, there needs to be complete and open sharing of mission-related data, much the same way as is done by Nasa through the Planetary Data System, which is open and accessible worldwide,” he said. “That said, science cooperation is easier than cooperation in areas of technology.”
John Lee, director of the East-West Futures consultancy, which analyses China’s digital technology industries, said he expected China would try to keep research partnerships open in Europe, and he would keep an eye on whether science and technology cooperation with Russia was stepped up.
“In the US, and increasingly in Europe, academic collaborations with Chinese researchers are increasingly subject to regulatory scrutiny at both the institutional and government levels,” Lee said, adding that Chinese researchers working at US institutions also faced more pressure from law enforcement investigations and politicians.
He pointed to a preprint study released in November that found AI researchers from the US and China increasingly avoided citing each other’s work and kept apart at international conferences.
“China’s problem is that advanced research and development and science activity is still concentrated in the US and its security allies,” Lee said. “India is an increasingly important player but is also leaning towards the US.
How the US and China can collaborate on reducing methane emissions
“Russia is the only major science and technology player where politics works for, rather than against, collaboration with China, and Russian capacities will suffer from the international sanctions regime.
“This picture mainly depends on how much US allies and especially the EU countries are willing to continue science and technology engagement with China.”
He said the current political climates in the US and China were too hostile for science diplomacy to have any impact on the bilateral relationship.
“There will need to be an improvement in the overall bilateral relationship that leads to a revival of scientific collaboration,” Lee said. “But this seems unlikely for the foreseeable future.”
Song Haijun, a professor of palaeontology and geobiology at the China University of Geosciences, said scientists from both countries who were studying the history of life brought different research techniques and specialisations to a field that served as a lens in the study of the global warming being experienced today.
01:57
China condemns new US law aimed at boosting domestic semiconductor manufacturing
“While the US technology is mature, with a long history in the area, China is rich in fossil materials, which can be shared for scientific research purposes under the regulation on the protection of fossils,” he said.
“There have been many instances where carbon dioxide levels shot up in the Earth’s history. Looking into the past sheds light on why and how climate change events happened and how they affected ecosystems. It builds a long-term perspective of climate change impacts and helps climate scientists make better predictions.”
Song said his team’s collaborations with peers from Britain, France and the US had remained largely unaffected by political and economic tensions.
“International scientific seminars and conferences, which are usually unaffected by politics, are great opportunities to exchange ideas and promote understanding,” he said. “We work together to tackle global issues like climate change.”
