中文
By William Jones
A landmark science agreement between China and the United States, signed in 1979 after the U.S. and the People's Republic of China officially established diplomatic relations, is up for renewal at the end of August and the "China hawks" in the U.S. Congress are working overtime to see that this agreement is canceled. Several congressmen have written a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, calling on the Joe Biden administration not to renew the agreement. The initiative came out of the recently created "Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party," led by former military intelligence operative, Representative Michael Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin. The measure is a continuation of a policy of attempting to deprive China of technological advantages that might be garnered from such cooperation.
What these fellows don't seem to understand is that this cooperation has been a two-way street, as is usually the case in such scientific collaboration. The basis on which science develops is the ideas generated by the individual human mind. The importance of the exchanges among scientists is precisely to help generate in the mind of someone those new ideas that will provide breakthroughs in the field.
While China has no doubt benefited from this collaboration, so has the United States, with many important innovations garnered by the U.S. in the area of forestry as well as in earthquake detection. Much of the cooperation has also been in the vital areas of medicine and health as well as in agriculture.
This has also involved the exchange of personnel in various fields, where many Chinese scientists were able to work at scientific and educational establishments in the U.S. and U.S. scholars were able to work at Chinese institutions. The work of Chinese scientists in U.S. facilities has contributed greatly to the economic growth of the United States and the development of its scientific capabilities. Many of the joint papers written by U.S. and Chinese scientists have provided a fount of knowledge in many different fields. And we have also seen recorded the fall in the number of scientific papers caused by the "brain drain" of Chinese scholars, and Chinese-American scholars, who have been forced to move abroad, many to China, under the heavy hand of the U.S. government's "China Initiative" and similar bigoted operations.
A manufacture robot at the World Robot Conference 2023 in Beijing, capital of China, August 16, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]
Renewing the agreement now, when China has become a major scientific power, is even more important to the U.S. side. In the early days, China no doubt benefited to a greater extent than the United States in this cooperation, but now that they have become a scientific powerhouse themselves, that flow of knowledge may well go in the opposite direction. Without a cooperation agreement, however, it will be difficult to take advantage of Chinese breakthroughs, or even difficult to get a picture of what they are, and many American scholars have already signed letters protesting such a measure. In that respect, the U.S. will become the "odd man out" since China is very open to working with other countries in science and most of these other countries are open to such collaboration.
It is also rather quixotic for the U.S. to believe that they will somehow keep China "in a box" scientifically by depriving them of intellectual products that have been previously available from the U.S. or getting U.S. "allies" to risk their well-being by joining such a futile crusade. With the tremendous scientific cadre now graduating from Chinese universities and academies, China is experiencing a significant spurt in the rate of growth in technological advances even with less access to the U.S. market in high-tech goods. These measures may slow things down and will seriously undermine the modicum of trust that remains between our two countries, but they will not prevent China from moving forward.
The fundamental failure of the United States in developing a rational policy of dealing with China which has already become a major economic and political power in a vain attempt to cut off China from leading technologies, can only lead to a world of chaos and mayhem. Trying to "restructure" the supply chains in a way that will only benefit the U.S. and its allies will quickly undermine the level of productivity that the world has achieved up until now, and could so rattle the already unsettled financial market that it may plunge the world into a new "great depression." It would be better if the U.S. found its position in a world that has become "multipolar" and found an appropriate way to live with China's rise, a rise which has already been greeted by most of the world's population as a boon to mankind.
William Jones, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a former White House correspondent for Executive Intelligence Review.
