The U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement Is Not Yet Obsolete

With so much attention focused on U.S.-China trade tensions and the threat by the State Department to “aggressively revoke” the visas of students from China, the publication in April of the updated the U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement (STA) has largely gone unnoticed. The Biden administration finished its tenure by expanding technology restrictions along a number of fronts, including in semiconductors and automobiles. Yet, in mid-December 2024, after a lengthy negotiation that was extended multiple times, the United States and China signed an extension of an umbrella agreement that provides a framework for continued collaboration between U.S. and Chinese scientists. Although the revised framework has some weaknesses, notably its narrowing of focus, it deserves support from government and scholars in both countries. The geopolitical environment has changed dramatically, but the STA is not yet obsolete.

Why It Matters

Scientific cooperation between the United States and China has now stretched over 45 years and provided both countries and the rest of the world with extraordinary advantages. In human health alone, contributions include a decades-long study that has helped to prevent millions of birth defects; cooperative work on influenza surveillance that has been critical to improving the seasonal flu vaccine; and work on HIV/AIDS that has helped to prevent China, with its enormous population, from becoming an HIV/AIDS hotspot. Joint research on everything from diabetes to heart disease to cancer has informed which medication and lifestyle interventions work best. And these are just some of the most well-known examples. Scientists have worked on everything from energy efficiency to better understanding agricultural pests. The cooperation has been rich and the results open and transparent, with the benefits shared equitably under an STA that, due to updates issued in 2018, now contains robust provisions to protect intellectual property.

There is no doubt that China has steadily risen in the rankings to become a scientific peer to the United States over this period. This hardly seems surprising given China’s scale and how much it has invested in improving its educational and scientific establishments. This cooperation began at a point when less than half of one percent of the college-age population attended college and PhD programs were in disarray. China graduates more than twice as many students from college as the United States, and as of 2017, it was awarding four-fifths as many PhDs annually. Moreover, China has long produced more PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields than the United States.

As a result, joint research between the United States and China has been enormously productive. In 2015, Chinese co-authors became the top partners for U.S. researchers, edging out the United Kingdom. However, since 2018, following the launching of the Department of Justice’s China Initiative and a deterioration in the broader relationship, the number of publications involving the United States and China has dropped, even as Chinese collaboration with the European Union has continued to grow.

The decline in contacts between the United States and China has had, in the words of one research group, “a broad adverse effect on scientific productivity across institutions and fields, not just those related to national security.” Lost collaborations with Chinese scientists have not been replaced by increases in collaboration elsewhere, and there are indications from multiple studies that the rise in investigations, particularly targeting U.S. scientists of Chinese origin, has resulted in an overall loss of U.S. scientific productivity.

To maintain its preeminence as the center of global science, the United States needs to have access to the best science, wherever it happens in the world. Increasingly, this necessitates collaboration with China. Though China may have historically been a source of students or a place to study specific issues, learning now goes in both directions. If the United States wants to continue to advance in artificial intelligence, the life sciences, medicine, climatology, physics, chemistry, and other fields, cooperating with Chinese counterparts will accelerate progress. Moreover, by enhancing cooperation, the United States can have a better handle on what is happening inside the China’s scientific establishment, making the country far better off to broach issues of concern.

The Evolution of the STA

Since 1979, the STA has been the foundation of U.S.-China cooperation. The agreement was designed first and foremost to cover government-to-government scientific cooperation and ensure that it is conducted under the principles valued by the United States—scientific integrity, transparency, respect of human subjects, and protection of intellectual property. Under the agreement, the United States and China have achieved major breakthroughs in health, environmental technologies, and more academic fields such as paleontology. The agreement also has provided language encouraging cooperation outside of government, in universities and laboratories. With this bilateral imprimatur, both countries have seen the flourishing of cooperative science at all levels, from growing numbers of graduate students and post-doctoral candidates to collaboration between established labs.

The agreement came up for renewal in 2023, and the State Department successfully negotiated a renewal, which was ultimately signed in December 2024. This decision was made after hearing from the scientific establishment and scholars from many disciplines regarding the importance of the agreement for the United States’ scientific ecosystem, both in terms of maximizing benefit to the United States and for ensuring the country is not blind to scientific developments in China.

There were three key changes to the text of the agreement, all sought by the United States. The first is radically narrowing the scope. Up until this version, the STA explicitly applied to both governmental and nongovernmental scholarly cooperation, including among students and universities. Moreover, the STA previously was viewed as encouraging cooperation across all areas of scholarly endeavor, including the social sciences and humanities. The updated agreement explicitly keeps its focus on the hard sciences and limits the scope to government-to-government work. From the U.S. government’s perspective, the agreement had only governed its own work, but the Chinese government had always seen the previous agreement as providing support for scientific cooperation, governmental and nongovernmental, more broadly. It is still unclear if that change will affect work with Chinese scientists in any way.

The second is a call to ensure the “safety, well-being and fair treatment of scientists engaged in science and technology cooperation,” a change that was requested due to concern for the safety of American scholars doing fieldwork in China. Hence, the agreement specifies, “Each Party shall, with respect to cooperative activities under this Agreement, use its best efforts to facilitate prompt entry into and exit from its territory of equipment and personnel of the other side, and also to provide access to relevant geographic areas, institutions, data and materials.” And if that was not direct enough, the next article is even more blunt: “Neither Party should arbitrarily detain, harass, abuse, or coercively threaten or intimidate an individual or subject an individual to an exit ban in connection with any cooperative activities pursuant to this Agreement.”

The last substantial textual change was an annex to the agreement requiring data transparency and reciprocity. This provides a mechanism for the exchange of government data that could be useful if government agencies choose to pursue it. Working with data in China has become more difficult since the adoption of China’s Data Security Law in 2021, and this agreement is a step toward addressing these concerns.

Breathing Life into the Agreement

The State Department went to great efforts to revise the agreement in a way that addressed U.S. concerns about scientist safety and data reciprocity. The narrowing of the coverage may have been pursued as a way to limit it to activities actually controlled by the two governments. It may also have been a way to blunt domestic U.S. opposition from those who see society-wide cooperation as inappropriate in an age of greater strategic competition and rivalry. Despite these adjustments, it is possible the agreement will not have its intended effect of promoting responsible scientific cooperation.

The first reason, mentioned above, is the narrowing of its coverage to government-based scientific activity. The second is the growing expansion of export-control rules and regulations emanating from Washington and Beijing that so expands the definition of national security–related fields that no field is left untouched. The third reason is the radical drop in the U.S. government’s funding of research on science and technology in general and the recent guidance prohibiting U.S. recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health from sharing any of their funding, including through sub-awards, with any international collaborators.

All three are serious obstacles to implementation, but there are potential pathways forward along each of these dimensions:

1. While this agreement does not provide support for the work of universities and laboratories, these nongovernmental institutions and scholarly associations could take it upon themselves to publicly endorse the STA and self-declare that they will carry out any cooperation with China in accordance with the agreement’s principles of transparency, reciprocity, and respect for the scientific method. This would help ensure the agreement continues to be an umbrella for all scientific work.
2. The United States and China need to take a strategic approach toward export controls and be sure that they fully cover scientific and technological endeavors with dual-use potential that could harm the United States’ national security. At the same time, they need to allow and facilitate research in basic science when progress is clearly beneficial to both countries and to humanity. Achieving this goal will require the United States and China to carefully evaluate the extent of the risks and how to most effectively mitigate them while still advancing valuable scientific activities.
3. U.S.-China scientific cooperation can only occur if the scientific enterprise is healthy within the United States. Starving the U.S. government’s scientific agencies of funding and politicizing their research agendas is the largest threat to scientific progress that the country faces. If American scientists do not have funding or are limited to work on topics that align with the current administration’s political priorities, they will not have the resources to engage in cooperation of any sort, and scientists from China and elsewhere will not see much value in working with them. It is imperative that cuts to funding are reverted going forward and that decisions about research topics and methods are left to those best able to make those decisions—the scientists themselves.

Looking Ahead

Overall, the updated STA is important for maintaining critical linkages between the two countries. The amount of actual scientific interchange between the United States and China dropped dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic, and while some nongovernmental science has resumed, government-to-government cooperation continues to be highly constrained. That is unlikely to change in the short term, but the agreement leaves open the possibility for new endeavors in the future if the two countries find areas of mutual interest. Moreover, it ensures that there is at least some version of government support for the idea of responsible scientific cooperation, and it lends some support to the nongovernmental scientists who conduct the lion’s share of the scientific work.

Deborah Seligsohn is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor of political science at Villanova University. Scott Kennedy is senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at CSIS.