The European Organization for Nuclear Research, more commonly known as CERN, is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. The scientific organization has 23 “member states” and its facilities in Switzerland attract researchers from around the globe.
Yangyang Cheng, a particle physicist and current fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, is drawn to the CERN as an institution that transcends national boundaries to advance knowledge. “I think of this institution, a collaboration that was built from the ashes of World War Two, as a way for how a continent that has been at war for so long can cooperate… in pursuit of a fundamental scientific quest,” she said. This idea resonates personally with Cheng, who came from China to the US to study when she was 19.
Cheng’s decision to come to the US made her part of a tradition of cultural and academic exchange between the US and China. “I [would] say that it was a personal decision,” she said about her choice. “It was not a show of allegiance to any government.” Cheng’s transnational approach to research stands in contrast with today’s politics—there has been a marked decline in US-China relations in recent years. This tension has manifested at Yale and universities around the US.
Yale boasts of a particularly rich connection to China as the first American university from which a Chinese student graduated. Today, Yale operates programs like the Light Fellowship, which grants scholarships for language study in East Asia, and the Paul Tsai China Center, which seeks to support Chinese legal reforms and advance American understanding of China. Yale welcomes hundreds of Chinese students each year and has robust programs in Chinese language and history. Regardless of whether Yale in fact “enjoys the distinction of having the deepest relationship with China of any university in the United States,” as the university claims in a promotional pamphlet, there is no doubt that deep ties exist between the school and its Chinese students, alumni, and peer institutions. “There is a deep and enduring connection that’s made up of people,” said Denise Ho, a Yale professor who specializes in Chinese history.
But these bonds exist in a world of geopolitical maneuvering. US-China relations have deteriorated rapidly in recent years as tensions rise over trade disputes, Covid policy, and human rights issues, among other sources of conflict. Susan Thornton, a former diplomat who worked on US policy towards China, said, “This change in the US policy towards China is the fastest and deepest radical change in a US foreign policy consensus in recent history.”
In response to tensions between the two governments, the American public has also become more hostile to China. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, negative views of China increased almost 20 percentage points among Americans between 2016 and 2020. This downturn was exacerbated by unfavorable views of the Chinese government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. However, the trend had been evident since the start of the Trump presidency. Notably, 2020 was also the first year in which over half of young Americans surveyed reported negative views of China. Typically, older people are more likely to report these beliefs.
The deterioration of US-Chinese relations affects academia in many ways. The number of Chinese students enrolled at US universities has declined, partially due to visa restrictions, while the Chinese government has taken a more active role in determining which China researchers are permitted to attend international conferences. Recently, China barred Chinese scholars from attending a conference in the US organized by the Association for Asian Studies, a Michigan-based group. Independent observers who reviewed the Chinese researchers’ work stated that they did not touch on subjects typically considered sensitive by the Chinese government, including Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uyghur people. Previous censorship of academic work by the Chinese government tended to target only work that addressed these sensitive issues.
This trend worries Yale professors whose work involves China. Ho, the Yale history professor, wonders what may happen in the future. “Not only can we research in China, but can we talk to our Chinese colleagues? Can we write things together? Can we send our students to them? Can they send their students to us?” she asked.
Many experts emphasize that both the pandemic and politics have contributed to these problems. “I haven’t been to China for two and a half years now, almost three years. As someone who studies Chinese history, it’s really hard to not be able to go do research. But how much of that is politics and how much of that is Covid is hard to tease out,” Ho said.
Of course, the pandemic has also helped create the current political moment. “[The change in foreign policy is] also all tied up with this COVID-19 outbreak, of course, so there’s just a lot of things that are making this a very unique mix of factors and very complicated,” Thornton explained.
The deterioration of the US-China relationship has not just affected researchers’ ability to travel and study, but also research itself. In 2018, the Justice Department launched the China Initiative, an attempt to address concerns about theft of American intellectual property by China. The initiative brought criminal charges against numerous researchers, largely of Chinese descent, at universities across the US. The Committee of 100, a non-profit group of Chinese Americans dedicated to improving US-China relations, surveyed nearly 2000 researchers at 83 American universities about the China Initiative. They reported that researchers of Chinese descent were four times more likely to have canceled projects with Chinese counterparts for fear that these projects could make them targets of prosecution.
The China Initiative formally ended in February 2022, but there remain informal restrictions on discourse about China. “There is this straitjacket around opinion now around China which comes from this sort of orthodoxy about patriotism in America. People feel quite constrained in their breadth of opinion that they’ll express and questions they’ll ask about what’s happening on China policy,” Thornton said, referring not only to academia but to policymakers and businesspeople as well.
Amid diplomatic quarrels and geopolitical tension, many academics just want to focus on their work. Cheng, the Yale Law School fellow, emphasized that she thought of herself as an academic independent from her identity as a Chinese immigrant. “I’m an academic. I’m an intellectual and that remains my most important professional identity,” she said “My only interest in political power is as a subject of study.”