Decoupling of knowledge networks

In June 2020, the United States blacklisted several of China’s premier universities, including the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), which has been referred to as the “MIT of China”. The effects of restricted entity status were felt immediately: HIT faculty and students no longer had access to critical simulation and research software from the US, such as MATLAB, which is used extensively in R&D programs around the world.

Other ramifications included the severing of exchange programs between HIT and the University of Arizona and the University of California, Berkeley. More broadly, the placement of HIT on the restricted entity list exposes other Chinese academic institutions that are part of a wider network of research being funded by both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This “civil-military” fusion of activities at Chinese academic institutions increases the possibility that more will end up on Washington’s restricted entity list.

One of China’s flagship academic institutions, Tsinghua University, plays a central role in China’s state-funded semiconductor research and works closely with Chinese SOEs. Should it be targeted with US sanctions, there would be immediate ramifications for a number of the world’s top universities, many of which have collaborative partnerships and exchanges with Tsinghua.

Meanwhile, India, the world’s largest democracy, is looking to capitalize on US-China decoupling by investing in US-India education links. Thus, even as the pipeline of STEM Chinese academics and students might decrease in the United States, India’s techno-nationalist vision involves attracting American universities to India, which would have the effect of creating more homegrown human capital, while balancing the two-way innovation pipeline with the US.

Beijing’s strategic ties to global universities

China’s Thousand Talents Program targets high-level scientists and other experts from overseas. It offers significant financial support to relocate to China for conducting research in high-tech industries and technologies of the future, and for participating in China’s major scientific programs in support of China’s high-tech development plans, such as Made in China 2025. The program has been instrumental in giving Beijing instant access to R&D, strategic IP, and talent pools that have taken years to develop at US and European institutions.

To many China observers, therefore, the Thousand Talents Program is linked to Beijing’s alleged hybrid IP acquisition efforts, which include the use of rewards, deception, coercion, and outright theft.

These suspicions have been compounded by China’s National Intelligence Law, which requires Chinese citizens and organizations to render assistance to the state security and intelligence organizations, when asked. Thus – whether justifiable or not – Chinese academics and students working and studying on foreign campuses have fallen under increased suspicion.

In January 2020, Charles Lieber, a Harvard University nano-scientist and former chair of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, was arrested on charges that he failed to declare his ties to China’s Thousand Talents Program.

At the time of Lieber’s case, a Chinese graduate student, Yanqing Ye, was also arrested for failing to disclose she was a lieutenant in the PLA when she gained a non-immigrant visa to conduct studies at Boston University, in the Department of Physics, Chemistry, and Biomedical Engineering. Ye is accused of spying for the PLA. Devices seized from her showed she accessed US military websites, researched US military projects, and compiled information for the PLA on two US citizens with expertise in robotics and computer science, according to federal documents.

Other incidents similar to these underscore the challenges facing both academic institutions and public officials as they adjust to the US-China technology cold war.

More broadly, growing calls to ban China’s Confucius Institutes from Western college campuses, on the grounds that Beijing has used them for influence campaigns and to monitor overseas Chinese students, also added to decoupling pressures.