Biden Administration Seeks Temporary Renewal of China Science Agreement

T he Biden administration is seeking the renewal of an agreement that sets the terms for scientific-research cooperation between U.S. and Chinese entities, the State Department told reporters yesterday, days before a deadline to renew it.

The agreement’s future has been the topic of heightened scrutiny given growing awareness of China’s efforts to use foreign scientific advancements for military purposes. Opponents argue that the treaty enables the Chinese government’s military-civil-fusion system, which aims to co-opt American technology for use by the People’s Liberation Army.

The accord in question is the U.S.–China Science and Technology Agreement, which establishes ground rules for joint research between institutions from the two countries. It was first signed in 1979 amid the normalization of ties between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party–controlled government on the mainland, and it has since been renewed every five years. The last renewal was 2018, and it is set to expire on August 27.

According to the State Department, the Biden administration is just asking for a short-term renewal of the agreement as it seeks changes to its text: “This short-term six-month extension will keep the agreement in force while we seek authority to undertake negotiations to amend and strengthen the terms of the STA. It does not commit the United States to a longer-term extension,” a spokesperson told National Review.

“We are clear-eyed to the challenges posed by the PRC’s national strategies on science and technology, Beijing’s actions in this space, and the threat they pose to U.S. national security and intellectual property and are dedicated to protecting the interests of the American people,” the spokesperson said. The State Department did not elaborate on these intended amendments to the agreement.

In the weeks leading up to State’s announcement, supporters of the agreement had come out in force to advocate that it be renewed. Stanford professors Steven Kivelson and Peter Michelson had circulated a letter among other scientists earlier this week to seek their signatures before the State Department’s announcement, writing that “cutting off ties with China would directly and negatively impact our own research, the work of our immediate colleagues, and/or the educational mission of our universities.”

Meanwhile, Beijing’s position on this was no mystery; it strongly supported the agreement. The Chinese ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, took meetings that seemed to be focused on the renewal of the treaty with key figures in America’s science establishment.

He tweeted about one such discussion with the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sudip Parikh, earlier this month. “Over the years, our S & T cooperation has saved lives, reduced birth defects, fed billions, protected forests, controlled pollution, etc. in both countries and the world. The mobility of science is what makes it strong,” Xie wrote.

The pursuit of a short-term renewal, as opposed to a longer-term one, seems to be at least partly a response to concerns raised by China hawks who had urged Biden to walk away from the treaty. They pointed to evidence that projects conducted under its aegis have led to the transfer of technology with military applications to China.

Much of the opposition to renewing the agreement came from Congress. In June, a group of Republican House members wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken linking the agreement to the Chinese military’s surveillance-balloon program. “In 2018, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) organized a project with China’s Meteorological Administration — under the STA — to launch instrumented balloons to study the atmosphere. As you know, a few years later, the PRC used similar balloon technology to surveil U.S. military sites on U.S. territory — a clear violation of our sovereignty,” wrote the group of lawmakers, led by Representatives Elise Stefanik and Mike Gallagher.

Senator Rick Scott, in his own letter to Blinken, cited the Chinese government’s refusal to provide unfettered international access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to investigate the origins of Covid as a blatant violation of the treaty.

But Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has been outspoken about China’s lack of transparency surrounding the origins of Covid, told NR that the administration’s approach makes sense because while there are no downsides to renewing the treaty, letting its lapse would come with “major downsides.”

“The concerns raised in the June 27 letter by Representative Mike Gallagher — particularly the concerns about dual-use research, in which research pursued for civilian purposes also could have military applications — warrant attention, but these concerns would be better addressed by amending the agreement than by not renewing the agreement,” he said.

Other experts say that opportunities elsewhere should become the priority. In an op-ed for the American Conservative, former U.S. chief technology officer Michael Kratsios and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy official Erik Jacobs argued that letting the deal lapse would restore balance to scientific exchanges between the U.S. and China, which are marred by intellectual-property theft. Instead, they wrote, the U.S. should focus its energies on boosting research with its allies.