Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica
Podcast with Deborah Seligsohn.

Paragraph 1: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of
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news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear
nor favor.

Paragraph 2: I’m Kaiser Kuo coming to you from Chapel Hill, North
Carolina.

Paragraph 3: This week on Sinica, we’re going to take a break from
talking about the Russo-Ukrainian War to focus on what I believe is a critical issue
that really accelerated the precipitous downturn in the U.S.-China relationship, and
unless it is addressed, it will likely exacerbate problems in the relationship to
the great detriment, I think, of not only both countries, but all of humanity.

Paragraph 4: The issue that I’m talking about is the crumbling, the
atrophy, the willful dismantling of scientific collaboration between China and the
United States. The deterioration over the last several years of what was not all
that long ago, a really fruitful relationship in many fields of science, has already
taken a ghastly human toll. I’m talking of course about the millions of deaths due
to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the countless livelihoods devastated by it. And
my guest today will certainly talk about that facet of the issue, but she’ll also
share her own ideas observed at firsthand of what we gained, what we’ve lost beyond
the already incalculable price of COVID-19, and what we still stand to lose.

Paragraph 5: Joining me again is Deborah Seligsohn, an assistant
professor in political science at Villanova University, who right now is a visiting
scholar at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown
University, where she recently gave a talk that I had the pleasure of watching and
which inspired me to reach out about getting her back on the show. Debbi, of course,
has been on the show quite a number of times now, especially since the pandemic
began, as she’s just been one of the most reliably informed, insightful, and
fair-minded observers of the debates around COVID-19 and China. When I say that
she’s observed the U.S.-China science relationship firsthand, I am referring to the
fact that Debbi served as the Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Counselor
at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007. And then, from 2007 to 2012, she
was the principal adviser to the World Resources Institute’s China Energy and
Climate program. After coming back to the U.S., she got her Ph.D. from UC San Diego.
Debbi, welcome back to Sinica.

Paragraph 6: Deborah: Thanks. Good to see you
again, Kaiser.

Paragraph 7: Kaiser: It’s always lovely to have
you, and thanks so much for making the time on a Friday afternoon.

Debbi, the main question that you address in your talk,
which you answered, I think, in a way that I’m convinced is correct, is really why
is the U.S. walking away from scientific collaboration with China and doing so just
at the moment when it actually stands to gain from it, just as China had gained from
it for so many years? But before we get to that, perhaps we can first talk about how
and why scientific collaboration between the U.S. and China was a priority for the
U.S. in the first place. As both a political scientist and a former diplomat, I
think you’d be a great person to explain this. What was the impetus for it? And why
did the U.S. pursue a deepening scientific relationship with China initially after
the normalization of relations some 40-odd years ago?

Paragraph 8: Deborah: So that was what was really
interesting to me when I started doing the research on this project, because as a
science counselor, of course I knew it was important, that it was a mainstay of the
relationship. I always called it the ballast of the relationship, the thing that we
could keep going and keep gaining from and sharing even when other parts of the
relationship were fraught up until the last five years or so, but I didn’t really
understand where it had started. And when I went back to look at the literature,
essentially from the Carter era, when the U.S. and China normalized relations, you
find that first of all, both the U.S. and China thought that China’s economic
development would be good for both countries, that the U.S. saw China as a potential
market and was very excited about that. And then both the U.S. and China saw science
and technology as a key to development.

For China, I think this goes back a long way. You and
I both love the May 4 movement. And we know about Sài Xiānshēng 赛先生. So Mr. Sai is
an important part going all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. The
idea that basic scientific research might be good for economic growth in the U.S.
was actually a pretty new idea in the ’70s that if you go back to the ’50s and ’60s,
science had more to do with national security, national prestige, but not so much
with a direct economic link. But in the seventies, this idea had caught on. And this
guy, Richard Atkinson, who was the head of the National Science Foundation sponsored
a study on this. And he was really pushing this idea. And so the U.S. had this idea
that helping China develop technologically was going to be good for helping China’s
economy and helping China’s economy would create a market for the U.S.

So we both were interested in seeing the same things
happen, basically. And then Atkinson went to China. There were a couple of visits
even before normalization and they were very nervous. They didn’t know what the
Chinese side would want or anything. And Atkinson goes and sort of proposes, can we
do some kind of student exchange? And they thought, well, maybe we can get them to
agree to 50 or a hundred students. And the Chinese come back that they want
thousands to be sent to the U.S. And they demand that Atkinson called the white
house in the middle of the night and get this agreed to, and he’s told that
basically Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平 wants this himself and he should get a move on it. So
the science and technology umbrella agreement becomes the first agreement that
Carter and Deng sign under after normalization. It really is the start of the modern
U.S. China relationship.

Paragraph 9: Kaiser: So Debbi, I remember a
conversation that I had with Chas W. Freeman Jr. who was, of course, one of the
diplomats who was at the very heart of that early period. And he explained to me the
rationale of what the U.S. wanted to do, not just in terms of the commercial
possibilities that it would open up, but also because we wanted to enmesh China in
kind of a comprehensive set of relationships, not just diplomatic, military,
commercial, as you say, but extending throughout society to arts and culture, to
education, to public health, and of course, science.

And that made a whole ton of sense to me, of course,
because bringing China in and on all those different levels would just simply make
it difficult for China to be a disruptive actor. It wouldn’t be able to sort of
repeat what it had been doing in the 1960s and the 1970s. And Susan Thornton when
she was on this show recently also talked about the importance of engagement at all
levels of society. So that must have been part of the thinking too, that drove us to
pursue this collaborative, scientific relationship. I don’t think it was just that
we thought let’s grow their market and make some money, right?

Paragraph 10: Deborah: Well, yeah, to be honest,
Atkinson, doesn’t talk about that that much at all. And so in terms of the science
advisors, they were very excited about this because the grow-the-market thing was
not just about grow China’s market. It was also about grow the U.S. market. This was
just where thinking about science policy was at that moment in time, but you’re
absolutely right. That starts even earlier, right? With ping-pong diplomacy and the
National Committee, this idea that we wanted people to people relationships. And so
yes, I think part of the idea that you start by proposing bringing students over is
because you really do want to create those human relationships.

Paragraph 11: Kaiser: Absolutely. So maybe we can
do a quick overview of what came of those broadly collaborative decades and what the
major milestones were, the highlights, the important inflection points, the great
things that came out of that collaboration. You covered a lot of that in your talk.
And some of it was really quite new to me and really pleasantly surprising. Maybe we
can start with a highlight reel of the relatively unambiguous good stuff that came
out of that relationship.

Paragraph 12: Deborah: Well, so obviously one of
the huge ones is human health because there was this 1978 scientist visit from NIH,
CDC, FDA. Well actually, I don’t know if FDA but NSF and DOE and all these people to
China and the NIH and CDC people were immediately excited about things that could be
done with Chinese collaborators. And one of the things that they got very interested
in very early was that Chinese medical care is actually pretty organized, that
people are registered with their local clinics or hospitals. And they introduced
early in the ’80s kind of data collection and wound up with these enormous cohort
studies where you could look at 250,000 pregnant women or 250,000 people with
diabetes and the pregnant women’s study wound up being where they determined that
folic acid was critical for preventing neural tube defects. That study was so
successful that they called it off in the middle. When a medical study winds up with
really rapid great results, you stop it and start giving the treatment to everyone.
And that’s what they did. And then they kept that cohort going and they continued
for decades to look at new ideas, new data, environmental impacts, different
vitamins, all kinds of things, followed the kids as they grew up. There was this
huge diabetes study I think up in Harbin. Again, Chinese medicine was actually well
organized to collect data on just enormous numbers of people, which is what you
often need, especially for finding any result for a dietary impact, like folic acid.
And then working together on influenza was huge. China is one of the places where a
lot of new influenzas arise because of the close proximity of humans, pigs, and
chickens.

Paragraph 13: Kaiser: Chickens.

Paragraph 14: Deborah: Chickens and ducks. And so
within the World Health Organization (WHO), global collaboration, the U.S. worked
with China to increase the number of surveillance sites. And that’s gone from tens
to tens of thousands. And also to help the Chinese get their national lab up to the
standard where it could become a WHO coordinating center. So one of the things in
terms of trust in working together for years, the Chinese sent all their samples to
Atlanta until they got up to this WHO level where they could test them all and do
the sequencing themselves. They now are one of the global centers, and that’s been a
huge triumph and enormously helpful for tracking influenzas and looking for these
rare bird flus, et cetera. So health has been a huge one and we work together
closely on AIDS and we’ve worked together on cancer drugs, cancer treatments,
Artemisinin of course introduced as an anti-malarial drug.

But then we have from the beginning, a lot of interest
in fossils, China has a lot of dinosaurs and that’s been a very successful
collaboration that continues to this day and kind of cool because there were these
folks up, especially in Northeastern China kind of collecting fossils on their own
before the Smithsonian got involved and they really could ramp up that effort. Early
on, I think we all know the interest by American scientists in Chinese physicists.
Americans tend to know Fāng Lìzhī 方励之 as a dissident, but before that he was a
physicist known in the U.S. and Chinese theoretical physicists were among the first
scientists that were really sort of welcomed by their international collaborators
because the kind of work they do was not so equipment dependent. If you remember
back to the ’80s when we all went to China for the first time, Chinese bio labs or
chem labs just didn’t have the kind of equipment that would be needed to do
something.

But if your main work was mostly in your head, you
could do work that was at a global level. And of course, Fang’s university, the
Chinese University of Science and Technology in Hefei became this big source of
graduate students. And that’s where this sort of the graduate student poll really
started, that Chinese students became known as fantastic Ph.D. students. And
originally it was this focus on Hefei and then it sort of expanded throughout the
country.

But I was just talking today with a guy who works on
space geology basically, and has worked with Chinese collaborators now for more than
a decade. It’s everything because another really important one is that China was 10%
of the Human Genome Project. And that’s where the Beijing Genomics Institute that
has become a global powerhouse and gene sequencing really got its start. Similarly,
Chinese scientists are huge climate scientists. They’re great at modeling. That
really has been a big issue area and one where U.S. and Chinese scientists are both
huge parts of the intergovernmental panel on climate change that does these big
studies at various points. U.S. and Chinese scientists have been co-chairs. There’s
a lot of cooperation in that area, but I think there’s a lot of cooperation in many,
many areas. And there are many probably that I just don’t know anything about.

Paragraph 15: Kaiser: Yeah. There’s basically no
-ology where there isn’t collaboration in some form. I guess lets talk about what
went wrong. You actually, in your talk, which was really great, you gave a couple of
milestones that you said changed thinking or were expressions of changed thinking
both in Beijing and in Washington when it came to scientific collaboration. One was
the suppression of the Tiananmen demonstrations in June of 1989. And the other was
the Cox Report of 1998. Can you talk about the significance of these and how they
impacted the course of scientific collaboration between China and the U.S.?

Paragraph 16: Deborah: So the basic idea back in ’79 was that Chinese
students were going to come to the U.S., they were going to study something and they
were going to go back to China, that this was how the people to people part of it
happens, this is how the economic development part of it happens. And actually a lot
of Chinese students in the ’80s did because a lot of them were on these one
and two year visiting scholar type things. They didn’t really settle in that
much, but what happens then is in 1989, after the Tiananmen demonstrations, the U.S.
allows all Chinese who were in the U.S. at the time to stay, that they’re all
given parole, I think is the actual technical term, but they’re basically
allowed to stay beyond their student visas or whatever kind of visa they had. And
that really creates just a completely different dynamic moving forward, because you
get this enormous cohort of students who settle in the U.S. get jobs at American
universities and essentially create the pathway for their younger peers to do that
in the ’80s and the 2000s.

And so right by the ’90s, basically 95% of the graduate students who go to the
U.S. are staying in the U.S. after graduation. And especially among Ph.D. students,
it’s just considered the norm. That’s gone down now to maybe 80%, but it
still tends to be the case that Chinese who come and study in the U.S. for advanced
degrees tend to choose to stay. And so that changes the dynamic to most American
scientists. That means that America is benefiting more. But from the Chinese point
of view, they’re not getting what they originally had planned for. And it
leads directly to ideas like the Thousand Talents program and all these other sort
of recruitment tools in China because they’re not getting back the students
that they wanted.

It’s interesting that it actually took them about 15 years before they started
to do this, but by the mid aughts, they’re working pretty hard to try to get
some of these professors back. And they also do a lot of deals which now have become
controversial where they offer professors to maintain their U.S. affiliation and
have an affiliation in China if they’ll come back for a couple months, a year.
Basically they’re trying to get anything they can get. So that was the big
impact of 1989. Not so much on the politics, but on the sort of the migration
pattern.

Paragraph 17: Kaiser: Yeah. So before we go to the Cox Report, on ’89, I
remember… So I was a graduate student right after that, I went back and I was
actually working on S&T intellectuals in China, the policies toward them, that
was one of the things. And one of the things they did right away, right after
Tiananmen before the year ’89 was out, they launched this program called
National Level Scientists where they chose about a thousand, actually, scientists
who would be given reimbursement for all transportation fees domestically. In other
words, all their taxi fares, it would be issued passports to take part in
international scientific conferences and all airfare to those conferences would be
taken care of by the state. And so this was in effort already. You say that it
started by the mid aughts, but actually early on, they realized, I think that there
was an anxiety. They realized that they did not want S&T intellectuals defecting
to the sort of dissident side of things. And so they were making a push to…
And there was also sort of consonant with the whole technocratic flavor of govern at
that time in the late ’80s, early 90s.

Paragraph 18: Deborah: But that one was for scientists who were already in China.

Paragraph 19: Kaiser: That’s right. That’s right. Not trying to lure
them back, but prevent them from –

Paragraph 20: Deborah: Right. And then they got more and more interested in
trying to figure out how to lure folks back. But also they became more and more
willing to do these things where they weren’t luring them back a hundred
percent. They were willing to sort of create these joint appointments and stuff. And
that kind of stuff is not unfamiliar in the U.S. There are lots of American
professors who have gigs teaching in Europe or somewhere in the summer. So that kind
of thing, it’s not a China specific thing.

The fact that most Chinese who go study in the U.S. don’t come back is
relatively specific to China. The percentages from other countries that go home are
much higher. But I think they got more and more creative and more and more willing
to be flexible as time went on because simply saying come back and we’ll give
you taxi fare was not going really cut it. And for many scientists, having a foot in
both places is ideal in terms of finding the best graduate students, having the best
collaborators, you just want to be in as many places as possible.

Paragraph 21: Kaiser: That’s right.

Paragraph 22: Deborah: So, that was the big impact of Tiananmen. And then the Cox
Report is more political and had to do with sort of American domestic politics in
the ’90s and a lot of the politics around the Tiananmen sanctions. And as
those sanctions started to come off and American companies were doing more and more
in China, then a conservative part of the U.S. Congress became concerned about us
China relations and looking for issues where they felt there was a problem. And in
the late ’90s, there was this huge issue because two of the rocket companies
Hughes, and Loral did give export controlled information to their Chinese
counterparts.

Now they were companies, they were not university scientists, they were not
government scientists. It had nothing to do with government labs. And the reason the
companies did it, I don’t know that they ever said in public why they did it.
But the basic thing was Hughes and Loral had satellites that were being launched
from Chinese rockets, and there were technical problems with the rockets that they
were trying to solve, basically. And so that was clearly against the law. They later
paid enormous fines, I think unprecedented levels of fines for the time. But in the
Cox hearings, and then the subsequent Cox Report, the big focus was not really on
companies, it was on government to government science relations and concern about
the department of energy labs that tend to work with Chinese general armaments
division labs. And a lot of that had to do with things like nuclear safety.

We want to make sure if China’s going to have nuclear weapons that
they’re actually secure. And so we share a lot of information about security
because we think that’s good for the world. People may be concerned about the
government of China having nuclear weapons, but we way rather have the government of
China have them than a bunch of terrorists stealing them from the government of
China. So that was one big area. The other big area they went after was NASA. And
NASA’s actual relationship with Chinese in the ’90s was not actually
that deep, but because of this Hughes Loral rocket thing, that became a big part of
the focus.

So the Cox Report made a lot of sort of allegations and implications that the U.S.
government was somehow giving away a lot of secrets that there wasn’t a lot of
basis for that when proprietary information is given away, it generally over the
years has involved companies. As often as not, it’s actually involved
companies selling it legally at times when the market is not that great and the
Chinese are the best buyer in town. So we saw that with coal-fired power plants in
the 1980s, the core technology that the Chinese have then improved on time after
time. They bought in the U.S. when there was no market here for coal fire power
plants.

And so the company was looking for somebody and the Chinese bought it with a tech
transfer provision. Similar thing happened with Westinghouse and nuclear technology
in the early aughts because the Chinese were the only buyers. And so if you could
sell five nuclear power plants and then transfer the technology, that was the best
deal they were going to get. The Japanese had a similar situation with steel
technology in the ’90s. Again, it was a low point in the market. So Chinese
buyers have been smart, but that’s not against any global rule. And
there’ve also been some cases where there’ve been export control
violations. There’ve also been some cases of technology theft, almost always
involving companies. But what we’ve seen over the years is instead of focusing
on company behavior, there’s been a tendency in U.S. politics to focus on
government or academic behavior, where there really isn’t much evidence that
we’re giving away anything.

Paragraph 23: Kaiser: Right. That’s where we’re really barking up the
wrong tree. And I think that it’s one of the reasons why we see this decline
in collaboration. It’s this still very persistent notion, still incredibly
prevalent among many Americans that China got where it is in terms of science and
technology primarily through acts of theft. So if you put your figure on one of the
things that we’re getting wrong, one being that, why are we so concerned about
academic and government to government, lab to lab cooperation when that is not where
IP theft is happening. Why aren’t we more focused on the other stuff? We can
drill down and you can expand on that idea a little bit, because I think it’s
really important, but what else are we getting wrong about this idea of China and
IP? Because it really does seem very stubbornly rooted in our thinking right now.

Paragraph 24: Deborah: Right, so the basic thing I think we’re getting
wrong goes back to the fact that we started with this teacher student model, that we
assumed that we were the teachers and the Chinese were the students. And that
certainly was true in 1979. Chinese science had been a backwater for a number of
years, really suffered under the Culture Revolution and they needed to catch up.
But, you had an awful lot of people very eager to catch up. And so people moved
pretty quickly and Chinese science has made incredible headway. And I don’t
think we’ve gotten out of that model. And so the problem is instead of
realizing, oh, the student has now grown up and can actually teach the teacher
something, instead, the attitude has really been well, if they’re doing
something as good as what we’re doing, it must be because they stole it.

So that’s sort of the fundamental mindset. And then the problem, especially
when it’s applied to academic science, is that most academic science
isn’t about intellectual property anyway. So most scientists, everything they
do is published in open source journals. They’re not doing classified stuff.
So it’s non export control. They’re not doing anything that’s
patentable. When I looked into the literature on patents and U.S. universities, so
since the 1986 Bayh-Dole Act, universities have been encouraged to take out patents.
But in reality, the vast majority of universities have very few and the universities
that have made a lot of money from patents, it’s typically because they have
one patent that hits the jackpot. It’s not because a huge part of their
research is patentable and money making, it’s often some very specific thing.
So the idea that most academic science is in any way related to patents is just
misplaced.

And then of course, we tend to talk about almost everything as if it were IP. So IP
is patents, trademarks, and copyrights, but often we’re talking about Chinese
hacking and you could hack into a company to steal some patented information, I
suppose, but I’ve yet to hear an example where that’s what’s
actually going on. Maybe it’s happened. And one of the issues in the U.S. is
that companies are not very good at reporting when they’ve been hacked. But
more often than not, they’re just stealing some information. And while I
really don’t want you to hack into my computer and take my social security
number, that is not a patented item. That’s not intellectual property,
that’s just theft of information. So the IP conversation, it’s way too
broad and it’s often misapplied.

Paragraph 25: Kaiser: Yeah. I can see that. Related to this idea is this notion
that I think is still quite, again, stubbornly rooted in American thinking. This
idea that freedom and democracy are somehow necessary or even sufficient conditions
for innovation. It’s always struck me that this is a basic axiomatic American
assumption, or at least it used to be. It’s alive, definitely in some
quarters, but I’m inclined to think that we’ve inverted parts of it as
part of this kind of 10 foot tall syndrome that we apply to China. We somehow think
that China’s out-innovating us precisely because it has an authoritarian
political system, which leans on industrial policy and pushes science from the top
down, throws a whole ton of money at it, all the while stealing, of course. Where
are you on this? Where are we on this? Where do you think we are right now in our
national conversation about the relationship between political authoritarianism and
innovation?

Paragraph 26: Deborah: So first of all, throwing a ton of money is really a good
way to have a lot more scientific research happening in your country. And you can do
that regardless of the system. So I think that’s the fundamental problem is we
seem to be stuck right now at this weird moment where we assign everything to the
autocracy, democracy binary. And any aspect of China is apparently due to its
autocracy and any aspect of the U.S. is due to its democracy. And in fact, there are
many other reasons in both countries why things happen. Maybe this is a bit of an
improvement over cultural essentialism, but it’s still way too simplistic.

Paragraph 27: Deborah: And so the scientific research one leaves me really
scratching my head because for a long time, we said you needed this freedom to get
good science. And of course if you couldn’t live in an autocracy and produce
good science, we would have no Newton or Galileo. So it’s clearly good science
precedes widespread adoption of democracy, but also widespread adoption of democracy
did not hurt science. So they just don’t seem all that related and a bunch of
other things, including peace, stability, good funding for science, good education
systems, competitive markets for products probably does help. There are a lot of
other things that are obviously important for getting to good science, but I wish
people would just realize that democracy is great because it provides freedom in
human rights. And those are really wonderful things. And stop trying to claim that
democracy produces benefits in all these non-political realms that it’s not
that closely related to.

Paragraph 28: Kaiser: Deb, you had this really funny kind of half tongue-in-cheek
hypothesis as to why we are now locked into this democracy/autocracy framing, this
binary, and why, I think, maybe a little knowledge about the amount that you get in
an undergraduate education is a truly dangerous thing. I want you to share that with
our listeners. That was hysterical.

Paragraph 29: Deborah: Oh, so my theory is 30 years ago, when I was first going
to Washington, everyone had been an undergraduate econ major. And so they all knew
about supply and demand and they believed in free markets because you really have to
do the higher level math to understand oligopolies and product differentiation and
all that stuff. So they all sort of would give you this free market mantra that you
still get a certain amount. Now, the math and undergraduate econ majors has gotten
more complex. And so actually poli sci is usually a bigger major at most
universities than econ. So all the people in Washington are undergrad poli sci
majors, and again, they all have this simple binary of democracy and autocracy, but
they’ve never taken the upper level courses that will tell them how much more
complicated it really is.

Paragraph 30: Kaiser: Truly a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. That’s
fantastic. I love it. I’m glad you spelled that out. The other important
insight in your work, and you touched on this is you talked about how the teacher,
student framing, the learner model has really kind of misshaped our thinking on
this. Talk about the other ways in which that framing has led us astray, not just to
disparage China’s capacity for innovation, but it seems to be that
there’s a lot packed into this, that this framing has done. Can you expand
that a little bit?

Paragraph 31: Deborah: Well, especially in the Washington policy world,
it’s made people skeptical that there’s any benefit in continuing these
relationships. And it’s done that precisely at the time where first as we
discussed, there’s a lot to be learned from China. And I think scientists know
it in the U.S. What I’m talking about is not what people who are actually
working in a field feel about their counterparts, it’s people who cut the
deals and write the agreements and set up the data exchange programs.

And so that’s a real loss. And then the other problem is because things are
tougher in China today than they were 10 or 20 years ago, these government
relationships, government programs, government agreements are actually more
important, not less, than they used to be, that there is a need in certain areas for
example, for the NIH to have data exchange relationships with its counterparts in
China, and it both increases access to data. It also protects scientists from
getting on the wrong side of this 2018 Chinese data law, that if we engage, we can
get a lot more out of it and we can protect our scientists a lot better than when we
disengage.

Paragraph 32: Kaiser: Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right because I
have heard a lot of people who, I’m sure a lot of people listening to this
would say, look, yeah, collaboration wasn’t just shut down on our side.
Isn’t it true that China has made this a whole lot more difficult too? Look at
the 2018 data law or look at the national security law, all these restrictions that
they’ve imposed on sharing data. And so, yeah, I think that you’re
absolutely right. It’s precisely because it is more difficult that we need to
have these tighter government to government collaboration efforts. And yeah, as you
say, if I were working with the NIH and I were in China now I’d feel a whole
lot less sanguine about the outcome if I were to, yeah, like you said, get on the
wrong side of the data law, then I would a few years ago.

Paragraph 33: Deborah: Or if you’re not working with the NIH. If
you’re there completely on your own, you have nobody who’s created that
relationship with the Chinese government and you may have a relationship with a
specific university, but, I remember cases in the past where a bunch of biologists
are out sample collecting in the middle of nowhere and the local county government
decides to round them up and NSF calls over to the China NSF and says, hey, you
guys, we got a problem. And they just call up the local government, say, hey,
they’re with us, don’t worry about it. And these problems get solved
very quickly. And so that’s where this government to government relationship
can really help. And yeah, we are in a time when Chinese local government officials
tend to think that being very suspicious is a good idea. And so it’s good to
have an agreement behind you when you’re out in the field.

Paragraph 34: Kaiser: For sure. So when I think about all that we’ve lost
and how we’ve really paid a pretty terrible price for deliberately degrading
scientific collaboration, I immediately think of the gutting of our CDC office in
China and how we might have really avoided some of the horrors the last two and a
half years, but there have also been other negative consequences unrelated to COVID.
And can you share what some of those are? What are some of the other really kind of
bad outcomes of us having degraded the relationship?

Paragraph 35: Deborah: Well, the health one is the most obvious. I think working
together on climate stuff is detrimental to us because there’s a lot of
learning going on in China right now. They’re deploying a lot of things at
scale. It would be helpful to have a much more robust relationship. Quantum
computing is another area where we are apparently leaving the Chinese to just rush
off ahead of us. And that’s one where like a lot of the green energy,
we’re just not pouring the right amount of money in, that one of the ways that
we could collaborate better would be if we were investing heavily on our side so
that we could actually have something where we’re able to learn from each
other because we have the facilities.

And it’s just, at this point, we’re in a situation where, of course in
China, it’s very hard to get in and out. And we’re not even really
talking about that as far as I can tell at a government to government level. We
should be talking about how we want to see more exchange and more back and forth.
And instead you get the feeling that everybody in Washington is like, well, as long
as they’re not letting anyone in, we don’t have to worry for a while.
And it’s like, no, this is really bad.

Paragraph 36: Kaiser: Yeah. So, it’s frustrating to me because so many of
the people who apparently are happy about the collapse of scientific collaboration
are so because they look at everything through this sort of lens of national
security. So it seems to me that national security arguments have to be deployed
against them. I think you make a really good case that it is not in our national
security interest at all to blow up this relationship in science that it’s
actually in our national security interest to keep it going and to deepen it and to
strengthen it. The same can be said with military to military ties.

Paragraph 37: Deborah: Yeah. The idea that we’re going to keep China from
developing into a formidable economic power with global interest, to me
doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And so the more we understand it, the
better off we’ll be, and we don’t understand it if we’re not there
and we’re not working with Chinese and learning what they’re learning.
And obviously that would be the argument for military to military exchange. But I
think it’s the argument for exchange more broadly. And we also make the
situation more hostile every time we feed into a Chinese perception that our goal is
to keep China down. We can’t keep China down. And so feeding that concern does
not cause that to be the result, it just causes China to be more suspicious and
hostile.

Paragraph 38: Kaiser: Suspicious and hostile and to double down on indigenous
innovation, which is a weird thing because –

Paragraph 39: Deborah: So, indigenous innovation to me is one of the weirdest
ones though, because if we accuse them of stealing and then we tell them that when
they say they want to do it on their own, that’s bad.

Paragraph 40: Kaiser: Exactly what I was going to say. How do we square that?
We’re so concerned about intellectual property theft and then we freak out
anytime China wants to avoid intellectual property theft by actually innovating on
their own. I guess that makes sense in light of your explanations about how we frame
the relationship. It’s just sort of this element of resentment in it. Anyway.
So it’s impossible not to connect — we’ve already done this in the
conversation — this deterioration of collaboration with the now nominally defunct
China initiative, which was launched in November, 2018 under then attorney general
Jeff Sessions.

We’ve talked about it quite a bit on this show. We’ve had Maggie Lewis
from Seton Hall and Eileen Gu (谷爱凌 Gǔ’ Àilíng) and Jess Aloe from the MIT
Technology Review to talk about it. So the thing hasn’t been killed,
it’s kind of been rechristened. And as we’ve seen, even just today,
there was another China initiative case where a mathematician in Southern Illinois
was found guilty of tax evasion or something like that, but not actually of anything
like intellectual property theft, but maybe you could tie this decline in scientific
collaboration, more explicitly to the pathologies that have really led our
government now to cut off our nose to spite our face.

Paragraph 41: Deborah: Yeah. It’s a tragedy and it’s particularly a
tragedy for the Chinese American scientists who are caught in the middle of this
thing. Certainly for the ones who are investigated or convicted, their lives are
really upended, but I think most scientists of Chinese origin are really very
nervous at this point with what the U.S. is going to do and as it became very clear
in the Chen Gang] case, which is the MIT professor. And this is true of all of them,
but it was much more explicit in that case because MIT spoke up for him so
eloquently. He’s out there creating these relationships in significant part
because MIT encouraged him to do so often because the U.S. Department of Energy and
other institutions really encouraged MIT to do so. And then suddenly he’s
being investigated for these same cooperative relationships.

So I think it creates a lot of concern, hostility. It certainly makes people doubt
the idea that the U.S. is really this bastion of freedom and openness that we claim.
And certainly when we’re speaking to Chinese students, it creates enormous
skepticism about who we are.

But it also doesn’t do very much because as I say, these guys are not
producing intellectual property. Most of them have not done anything that’s in
any way known as classified. So what is it that we’re afraid they’re
telling their Chinese counterparts? For the most part, they’re just engaging
in normal science, all of which is going to get published in normal journals for
everyone to read. And so we’re creating a lot of anxiety and real harm to
people and it’s not obvious to me what the benefit is.

And intellectual property even was not considered a criminal matter until 1996 when
there was a law that the name has now slipped my mind, but it basically criminalized
international intellectual property theft. It’s still not illegal for
one’s U.S. company to steal intellectual property from another U.S. company.
You can sue them. It’s a civil matter. It’s not a criminal matter.

So everybody’s getting caught up in this thing that through the vast majority
of commercial history was never even considered criminal. So that’s one part.
So that was what the FBI was ostensibly looking at, but they found very, very few
cases and those that they have mostly are in the sort of company commercial range,
they have nothing to do with academics. So that’s been, I think, really,
really harmful. And it really has also caused Chinese scientists looking at the U.S.
to say, why would we want to work with you? You seem just suspicious and paranoid.

Paragraph 42: Kaiser: Exactly. And it makes me wonder whether it’s now even
too late to rebuild scientific collaboration or if it’s not, I think it would
take a pretty herculean effort. What do we need to do, Deb, to start to relay the
foundations of trust and to reconnect? I’m not entirely pessimistic about it
because I think that there’s still a lot of goodwill among the scientists
themselves.

Paragraph 43: Deborah: Yeah. I agree with you. And so I think there is an
opportunity to do it if we wanted to. One thing would be to tone down the rhetoric
in general. Another thing would be to recognize where the Chinese are doing well.
You still hear just kind of knee jerk criticism of China, for example, on climate
change, where of course China has to do more, but actually we’re the ones who
don’t have a national climate policy. And I’ve said over and over again,
if the U.S. had actually adopted build back better, the Chinese would’ve
responded competitively by having a much more ambitious program to promote green
industry in China. They’re already doing a lot and everybody thinks
they’re going to actually way exceed what they’ve announced as their own
goals.

Paragraph 44: Deborah: So, they’re moving in the right direction. We still
rarely compliment them for anything on the climate front. So one thing would be to
actually recognize things where they do well. Also, I think we could tone down our
language on the Russia Ukraine thing. They aren’t actually helping them. They
have abided by sanctions. There’s a lot of nasty rhetoric in China, but in
terms of what they’re actually doing, it’s not that much. So I think we
have chosen to have this very sort of rhetorically aggressive stance and I
don’t see what we’re getting out of it. And the idea that it’s
going to slow down China, I don’t know. So, overall I think toning down the
rhetoric would be helpful.

I think you’re right. I think that we could rebuild the scientific
relationships because at the person to person, professor to professor level,
there’s still enormous connections. And a lot of people are still talking to
their counterparts in China, sharing things, getting on Zoom and talking to each
other. There’s a lot that actually is happening at the people to people level
still, despite all. So I think we could rebuild. And of course, nadirs in U.S.-China
relations have been worse than this in the past. The great relationship that we had
and after normalization was after we had almost no relationship for many decades. So
I don’t think the fact that it’s bad now means it has to be bad forever,
but I do think that it’s not clear to me that sort of anybody has any clear
sense of what hostility to China is getting the United States.

Paragraph 45: Kaiser: Political benefit to individual politicians and
that’s about it.

So Deb, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you a bit about how all of this
plays into the current American discourse on COVID-19 and China. And I’ll try
to keep this to just a couple of questions. So two years ago, when this was all
starting… And by the way, I should add that in the early months of COVID one
of the things that I was cheered by actually was that I sat in lots of sessions
where doctors who had been in Wuhan were getting on zoom calls, and these were open,
and talking to doctors in the United States, in Baltimore, in Philadelphia, in other
cities and sharing therapeutic best practices. Treatment best practices. It was
really heartening.

And this was sort of like the kind of people-to-people that I thought… This
wasn’t organized by any government. This was one hospital or one group of
researchers in one country reaching out to another group of researchers in another
country. And that was great. But anyway, I was saying, a little over two years ago
when this whole thing started, Jeremy and I were talking about why, despite weeks
and weeks of watching what was happening in Wuhan, and even then in Italy and then
in Iran, Americans were still kind of collectively blindsided when SARS CoV-2
started infecting people by the thousands in the U.S.

And we had talked back then about how there was some very fine, very heroic, very
empathetic reporting out of China, Times and Journal reporters who
were behind the lines. They were in Wuhan, they were writing deeply human stories.
And some of them were great. But again, kind of the exception. And most of them kind
of covered it as a political story and the chattering classes in the states, as far
as I could see, were mostly thinking of it in terms of regime type. And we kept
trying to fit this regime type framing under what was happening just who was
handling it better, who was handling it worse, even though I think most of us
realized it was a bad fit early on. There were plenty of liberal democracies that
were handling things admirably well, and a lot of authoritarian countries, they were
doing just a total crap job, even ones with a lot of state capacity. We all started
using that word.

And then people tried that culture fit, you were talking about culture essentialist
explanations. My favorite theory was countries that use chopsticks are doing well,
but then that didn’t work either. But clearly there was something to it. Ed
Yong, who, I’m sure you also really admire the stuff he’s been writing,
he’s just been my hero in the journalist world through this whole pandemic. He
gave a really great talk. I’ll make sure to put a link to it. You
can see it on Vimeo. And talked about toxic individualism in America. And I
think it’s hard not to see that as a factor in the U.S. and the UK for all the
deaths here. Within America, it’s obviously political. You look at the
vaccination rates between Democrats and Republicans, and it’s obviously
there’s a political element to it.

But anyway, where are you in your thinking on this question? Because you have been
somebody I’ve been in dialogue with kind of directly on this and indirectly,
and you’ve always had really good ideas about this. So where are you when
you’re thinking about this question of why different governments, different
societies had such disparate outcomes when it comes to managing the disease? And
maybe you can bring it all the way up to the present. Why is it that some stuff has
worked at some stages of the pandemic and not well at all on the other. I’m
thinking obviously about Shanghai.

<pParagraph 46: Deborah: Right. So I think the things that some of the earlier
research tended to show mattered. One was social trust, that high levels of social
trust generally helped countries do better, but you needed to have a good policy. I
think Sweden has high social trust, but they decided to go for herd immunity. And
that was a bad idea. That was one. A second one, though, in the negative direction
is it’s pretty clear that populous leaders did particularly badly. So
it’s not just Trump and Johnson, it’s Bolsonaro.

Paragraph 47: Kaiser: Duterte.

Paragraph 48: Deborah: Venezuela, the Philippines, that populism was specifically
bad. And I feel like that more than toxic individualism actually is the criteria
that I would look at is how populist sort of a country is at a given moment, but I
don’t know, I’m not sure who else is really an individualist.

So, those were some of the criteria, but one of the things I think is there is a
need for flexibility over time because this has been a long haul and the story
constantly changes. You see the reminders of a year ago on Facebook now. And it was
like this glorious time when I had just been vaccinated and I felt like I actually
had a certain amount of protection, not just from hospitalization and death, but
from getting the disease. And I now know that my vaccination is going to really help
me from severe disease, but it doesn’t help me at all from getting sick. So
we’ve seen some of the countries that have a zero COVID policy, like New
Zealand and Australia realize it’s not going to work anymore with Omicron.

And then we see the Chinese just doubling down and they have gotten themselves in a
massive policy problem where we have these kind of pronouncements from Xí Jìnpíng
习近平 about how using the basis of the communist party or whatever the heck that thing
was that Victor Shih tweeted out this morning. So embedding it in sort of communist
ideology and the kind of stuff that local leaders don’t feel like they can
argue with and we always have this problem whenever there’s disease control
that at the local level, everybody wants to show their jiji (积极 jījí),
their enthusiasm. So remember during SARS they were spraying these chemicals
absolutely everywhere. And you saw the pictures early in COVID, right, of these
trucks driving through the street.

Paragraph 49: Kaiser: Again now. Yeah.

Paragraph 50: Deborah: So now that it becomes like lockdown, somebody I saw
posted on Twitter that his complex was now in lockdown plus. I don’t know what
the plus is and I don’t think he did either. So it was interesting talking to
a friend the other day about what has been one of the market advantages of the
Chinese regime throughout the reform period was this willingness to have flexible
policy, local innovation, things like that. And one of the interesting questions is
at this moment in Chinese political history, has that gone away? And that the regime
has become much more centralized.

And in certain ways, of course that’s been an advantage. They’ve been
able to enforce environmental regulations much more effectively than they could 20
years ago. But at this moment there’s clearly a need for innovation and nobody
seems to feel like they’re politically free to innovate. So I think
China’s in a very difficult situation. And given the nature of Omicron, this
could go on for a very long time, with a lockdown here, then a lockdown there, and
then a lockdown in another city.

I don’t see what the way out is with a disease that vaccination does not
prevent infection. The Chinese vaccines, there’s been a lot of misinformation
floating around, especially people comparing the mainland to Hong Kong without
really paying attention. There are things we know from the Hong Kong experience. One
is that the Chinese vaccines are helpful. They’re not as good as mRNA, but
they are actually reasonably helpful. The thing everybody seems to miss is the
vaccination rate in China is actually higher than in Hong Kong. And of course, most
Chinese cities are far less dense than Hong Kong is. So even though they’re
dense, they’re not the same. So we don’t know how it’s going to
play out, but there’s a real risk that this is going to go on for a very long
time. So I think they’ve gotten themselves stuck in a policy sense. And the
question is, when do they get themselves unstuck? I don’t really have a good
idea on it.

Paragraph 51: Kaiser: The problem is that a lot of the critics of the policy
don’t have very good ideas themselves either. I haven’t heard anyone
suggest to me how it is that approaching it as a lot of other countries have
allowing it to sort of burn through the population, how that is a tenable idea.

Paragraph 52: Deborah: Well, much stricter mask mandates, making sure everyone in
the population actually has high quality masks and improving ventilation, doing a
lot of work from home, reducing densities. It would burn through the population, but
at a low ebb if you could actually keep people in N95 masks, for example. You could
reduce density of offices and things like that, would work from home, et cetera, et
cetera, without locking people in their homes.

Because it’s not going to go away. How long are they going to keep people
locked in their homes? The point I’m always trying to make to the people who
want to blame China, blame China, is this thing is crazy infectious. And it was on
planes out of Wuhan by the middle of December before anybody knew what was going on.
So there was never a way to put this genie back in a bottle, but similarly,
they’re not going to put it back in a bottle now.

This thing is going to be floating around the world for a very long time. So I think
there are good policies and many of them are not being pursued well enough by the
west. And it is this layered approach, that you want everybody vaccinated, you want
everybody in masks, you want to significantly improve ventilation. You want to
reduce densities. This is what you need to do.

Paragraph 53: Kaiser: Wisdom, Deb, thank you. And thanks so much for taking the
time to join me and for sharing your experience and your insights. This is just such
an important subject and we will want to revisit it. So I look forward to having you
back on the show again, again. Let’s move on to recommendations, Deb, but
first, a quick reminder that the Sinica podcast is powered by SupChina. If you like
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All right, Deb, we’re moving to our recommendations and what do you have for
us?

Paragraph 54: Deborah: So I had two, but I feel like I’m going to have to
add one because you and I never discussed the lab leak. And there’s a
new article by Buzzfeed about the sort of right wing political origins of
pushing the lab leak allegations.

Paragraph 55: Kaiser: Oh, good.

Paragraph 56: Deborah: So, I have to recommend that.

Paragraph 57: Kaiser: So Buzzfeed, do you remember the author?

Paragraph 58: Deborah: No, but I’ll find it for you again and send
you the link.

Paragraph 59: Kaiser: Okay, great.

Paragraph 60: Deborah: But basically, there’ve been a few really good
academic articles recently on the Huanan market and the origins have become clearer
and clearer actually. But the origins of the allegations is new information. It has
to do with right wing animal rights people.

Paragraph 61: Kaiser: Really?

Paragraph 62: Deborah: Yeah. It’s a crazy story.

Paragraph 63: Kaiser: Okay. I’ll have to check it out. Somehow it got to
Matt Pottinger and from him to Josh, what’s his name?

Paragraph 64: Deborah: Oh, this is a whole different gr… These are real
animal rights people. So that’s one thing, but I wanted to recommend two
podcasts. So one is this podcast I keep recommending to you Odd Lots, which is a
Bloomberg podcast.

Paragraph 65: Kaiser: Yeah, no, it’s great. I’ve been listening.

Paragraph 66: Deborah: And I thought there was one on how the supply chain was
working in Shanghai at the very, very granular level last week of how you actually
do group buys in a Shanghai apartment block was fantastic, but they often go very
deep and very granular. And on the supply chain, the stuff they’ve done about
the port of LA has been amazing. And I just really find the level of detail
fantastic. And then I wanted to recommend Dollar and
Sense, David Dollar’s Brooking podcast because-

Paragraph 67: Kaiser: Oh really? Yeah. I love David Dollar. He’s great.

Paragraph 68: Deborah: He’s great. And he has his own podcast with no ads,
even better.

Paragraph 69: Kaiser: I did not know that.

Paragraph 70: Deborah: And he usually interviews his fellow Brookings colleagues.
And he talks about China I would say two thirds of the time, at least, maybe more
and gives you sort of a good economist view of what’s going on in the world.

Paragraph 71: Kaiser: What’s what the names of people in the China field.
How do we have people like Elizabeth Economy and David Dollar and Derek Scissors?

Paragraph 72: Deborah: I don’t know. Haven’t had such apt names since
I lived in New Zealand where there really were doctors named both Blade and Pain.

Paragraph 73: Kaiser: Oh man. That’s too on the nose to even be Dickensian.
All right. Those are great. Really psyched to listen to David Dollar’s podcast
because I really admire him, but Odd Lots I have you to thank for turning me on to
that. And I’ve been really grateful. It’s a great listen, so I totally
endorse that one. I’m going to recommend a show that I binged last weekend at
the recommendation of two of my colleagues Jiayun and Alex who both loved it. I saw
them in New York. It’s called Severance.
It’s on Apple TV, and oh my God, it’s great. It succeeds at so many
levels for me. It’s just really, really excellent. It stars Adam Scott, who
you guys might know from Parks and Recreation, as well as just like kind of an
all-star cast, it’s got John Turturro, and Patricia Arquette and even
Christopher Walken who’s really great in it.

And I really can’t wait for the next season. The whole aesthetic of the show
is fantastic. Everything about it, the plotting, the writing, it’s just great.
It’s got me on the edge of my seat. I can’t wait for the next season.
So, if you’re out there and you have Apple TV, I just signed up for apple TV
to get to watch this thing. And so if there are other shows on Apple TV that you
want to recommend to me besides Ted Lasso, everyone’s already told me Ted
Lasso, Ted lasso, and yeah, I’ll watch Ted lasso, but if there’s
anything else on there…

Paragraph 74: Deborah: I watch Dickinson.

Paragraph 75: Kaiser: Yeah.

Paragraph 76: Deborah: It’s one of these weird deliberately… They
have all the sort of the non historical stuff mixed in, about Emily Dickinson.
It’s kind of entertaining. I hate the Apple interface, I have to say
it’s the worst of all the streamings.

Paragraph 77: Kaiser: I like the abundance of subtitle languages. That’s
kind of cool.

Paragraph 78: Deborah: The other day I was trying to go back to an earlier
episode-

Paragraph 79: Kaiser: Oh, yeah, that’s tough.

Paragraph 80: Deborah: … the episode where Emily Dickinson visits Thoreau
is hilarious. Really, really funny. And I wanted to show it to a friend and I wound
up having to Google it. I couldn’t even find it within the app.

Paragraph 81: Kaiser: Wow. All right. You’ve been warned folks. Debbi,
thanks once again. So lovely to see you and so great to have you on. And if you want
to see the thing, I’ll put a link to it, but Debbi’s talk at the Watson
Institute on her paper is really good. You should definitely check it out.
It’s got lots, lots more detail than we were able to cover. So folks
that’s all and we’ll see you all soon. Debbi. I’ll see you soon.

Paragraph 82: Deborah: Thanks so much, Kaiser.

Paragraph 83: Kaiser: Alrighty. The Sinica podcast is powered by SupChina and is
a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser
Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email [email protected] or just
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discover the show and the interface isn’t that terrible. Meanwhile, follow us
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in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening. And we’ll see you next week. Take
care.