Dear Commons Community,
Bowing to national security concerns raised by members of the U.S. Congress, the University of Michigan (UM) last week announced it will terminate an institute run with an elite Chinese university that has funded joint biomedical and energy research and trained science and engineering students.
UM’s 20-year partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) is the latest academic casualty of rising geopolitical tensions between the United States and China. In September 2024, the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) pulled out of a joint institute it operated for 10 years with Tianjin University. And the University of California (UC), Berkeley is relinquishing ownership in a research hub it launched with Tsinghua University, known as China’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2014. As reported by Science.
The developments reflect “the really deep and steep downturn” in relations between the U.S. and Chinese scientific communities, says Tony Chan, a mathematician at UC Los Angeles and former president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “The message is very clear to universities,” he says. “Don’t have anything to do with China.”
Precipitating the UM-SJTU breakup was a blistering September 2024 report from Republican members of the bipartisan U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It argued that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. research funding over the past decade have helped China “achieve advancements in dual use, critical, and emerging technologies” such as hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, and advanced semiconductors. The report focused much of its ire on the joint ventures involving Georgia Tech and UC Berkeley.
UM came in the crosshairs in a 31 October 2024 letter from the chair of the select committee, Representative John Moolenaar (R–MI). He called on UM President Santa Ono to sever the university’s ties with SJTU because they “appear to create the same risks as those partnerships” targeted in his panel’s report. Moolenaar asserted that a number of the joint institute’s projects had advanced China’s defense and intelligence capabilities, including those focusing on rocket fuel research, anticorrosion technology for military aircraft, and 6G wireless networks.
SJTU was a pioneer in forging academic links with the U.S.: It was the first Chinese university to visit the U.S. after the two nations began to normalize relations in 1978. These days, Moolenaar asserted, SJTU “plays a critical role” in the CCP’s “military-civil fusion strategy.” And he noted that, in October 2024, federal prosecutors charged five Chinese students formerly with the UM-SJTU institute with covering up a midnight visit in 2023 to Camp Grayling, a remote military base in Michigan. The students took and then tried to delete photos of military vehicles, prosecutors allege.
UM is terminating the joint institute in light of the “significant concerns regarding national security and the integrity of [UM’s] academic research enterprise,” Ono wrote in a 10 January letter to Moolenaar. Ono stated that all UM-SJTU research projects had been wound up and that UM would “improve the vetting of visa requests for international students.”
“It’s a shame” the partnership had to end, says environmental health scientist Edward Zellers, a UM emeritus professor who collaborated a decade ago with SJTU physicist Hou Zhongyu on an instrument for analyzing breath biomarkers. Zellers says UM seemed attuned to national security concerns: It “scrutinized our work very carefully.” But he’s “not surprised” UM is shuttering the institute: “Maybe there was nefarious activity,” he says.
SJTU had not issued a statement on UM’s decision before Science went to press. At a higher education forum at Westlake University in China in October 2024, SJTU President Ding Kuiling said deteriorating China-U.S. relations had made it challenging to renew the agreement governing the joint institute before the universities signed a 10-year extension in 2023. The institute’s thousands of alumni had “played a very important role” in demonstrating the value of the partnership, he said.
Hoping to avert a total breakdown in scientific and academic ties, the U.S. and Chinese governments last month signed an extension of their 45-year-old Science and Technology Agreement. The pact lays out conditions for R&D collaborations between government entities in areas such as disease surveillance and clean energy, and serves as a template for university partnerships. Still, China’s top universities are increasingly forging alliances elsewhere. Fudan University, for example, in recent years launched the BRICS Universities League and the Fudan-Latin America University Consortium to promote ties outside the U.S. and Western Europe. “We’re reshaping our global cooperation framework,” Fudan President Jin Li told attendees at the Westlake forum.
Chan, who after leaving Hong Kong was president of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, warns that a “decoupling” of the Chinese and U.S. academic communities is bound to hurt both countries. “It’s not good for science,” he says. “And it doesn’t look like things are going to get better anytime soon.”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a member of a higher education group that started exchanges with China on matters relating to education and technology. I made two extended visits to Shanxi Province and colleagues from Shanxi subsequently visited CUNY here in New York. It was by far among the most important exchanges of my professional career. I came to understand the Chinese education system and vice versa. However, the goodwill and comradery between participants was the highlight. On September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center was attacked, the first email I received asking about my safety was from one of my Chinese colleagues, Li Sidian.
Sad that exchanges and joint efforts between our countries are ending!
Tony
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