China Initiative Still Haunted
How Trump-Era Policies Reshaped US-China Biomedical Research Collaboration
Yuqi Cheng
Edited by Sarah Ryley
2024.08.15
Trump-era persecution of suspected Chinese spies may have ended, but its impact continues to reverberate through the research community.
My data analysis reveals the impact in the field of biomedicine — the co-publication of the US and China funded by NIH has shifted to a significant decline since 2019.
Around the same time as the “China Initiative”, the U.S. National Institutes of Health launched its Investigation of Foreign Interference, focusing on undisclosed ties with other countries of grant receivers. The number of cases peaked in 2019 and has been declining since.
While the NIH acknowledges that China accounted for the vast majority of foreign interference concerns, no data on citizenship or national origin could be provided for the 651 allegations NIH received.
My analysis of citations and abstracts of biomedical research papers from 2014 through 2024, in the PubMed database, however, potentially reveals the Chinese-descendent scientists and institutions targeted by the initiatives by identifying those who abruptly stopped receiving NIH funding or stopped publishing papers in collaboration with U.S. institutions.
My analysis also, for the first time, identifies the Chinese institutions where the scientists prosecuted under the initiative are currently employed.
China is No Longer the U.S.'s Largest Partner in NIH-funded Research
The NIH is the primary federal agency responsible for conducting and supporting biomedical research in the United States. While most of the NIH’s grant funding goes to U.S. research institutions, some of the research, and by extension published papers, involves foreign collaborators.
In 2018, the Trump Administration launched the "China Initiative", aimed at rooting out alleged prosecuting suspected Chinese spies that administration officials claimed had infiltrated American research institutions. Around the same time, starting in 2017, the NIH began to investigate grantees according to allegations received from the FBI.
Criticized as racially biased, the “China Initiative” was put to an end by the Biden Administration in 2022. According to NIH data, the number of Foreign Interference cases it handles has also fallen rapidly this year. However, the published papers from US-China collaborations in NIH-funded research continued to decline.
Source: PubMed
For many years, China was the United State’s largest collaborator in published biomedical research, both with and without NIH funding. However, since the China initiative, the share of U.S. international collaborations involving NIH funding has declined, from 20% in 2017 to 14% by 2023.
The UK and Canada now have a greater share of published international collaborations, with 16% and 14%, respectively.
NIH-funded research accounts for about 30% of all the papers in the PubMed database. Even for the other papers, the share of US-China collaboration saw a similar decline in 2019, but less profound.
“One possible interpretation is that people are increasingly going back to China,” said Caroline Wagner, a faculty of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs of the Ohio State University. Another reason might be the increasing interest in science and technology sovereignty within China, she said.
Wagner believes that the “China Initiative” largely came from a misunderstanding of the nature of science, and she has seen significant improvement nowadays. “I went to a workshop recently with a number of different people who are in charge of [making policies]. And they've learned a lot,” she said.
“They realized that so much of what looked like a secret wasn't secret. It was just research that was being conducted and to be shared ultimately. Of course, researchers don't always share the work in progress, but they will share it as it's coming to a conclusion,” Wagner said.
Fear of Scrutiny Drives Scientists in the U.S. Away from Chinese Institutions
According to Wagner’s research, about 25% of collaboration between the U.S. and China can be called “China collaboration”: a Chinese person in the U.S. working with co-authors in China. This is common to see in international collaborations.
After the NIH investigation, some scientists would rather work less with other nations, especially China, to protect themselves.
NIH has made its Pre-award and Post-award disclosure requirements clear by listing 26 items on its website. Key personnel are required to reveal the funding source for any recently completed projects, overseas consulting services, or retention contracts, even the funding source for students and visiting scholars.
"A ton of paperwork is involved,” Yale pathology professor Qin Yan told me.
Yan clarified that the disclosure requirement is about all foreign nations and does not specifically target China. Nevertheless, Chinese scientists in the U.S. are still experiencing a "chilling effect" according to surveys and interviews.
A study that polled over a thousand scientists in 2022 found a significant feeling of unease and fear: 35% of respondents feel unwelcome in the U.S., and 65% are worried about collaborations with China. Participants are scientists of Chinese descent employed by U.S. universities in tenured or tenure-track positions.
It also discovered a consistent increase in the return migration of Chinese scientists away from the United States by examining more than 200 million scientific publications. Yale Cell Biology Professor Yongli Zhang told me that this could partially account for the drop in U.S.-China biomedical collaboration.
The "chilling effect" has been felt by scholars across various stages of their careers, including tenured professors, postdoctoral researchers, and PhD students.
Feared being probed, Jing Zhao, an assistant professor of chemistry at UConn, said she no longer accepts students funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC).
She intends to take a personal trip back to China in the summer. But she worries that when returning to the U.S., her electronic devices might be inspected and confiscated, as many Chinese faculties and students have experienced at the custom.
A Chinese postdoc at Yale School of Medicine said that his team has been collaborating with an NIH-funded Shanghai institute for many years. However, when the contract recently expired, his professor did not renew it. He was also worried about his search for funding. As a new postdoc coming to the U.S., the majority of his contacts and possible partners are in China.
Jie Xiang, a PhD candidate in Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, said that four years ago while being an undergraduate at Tsinghua University in China, he had collaborated virtually with a Harvard University research team. When he contributed papers to academic journals, the Harvard team asked that their institutions and names not be mentioned.
Previous incidents have also caused many Chinese academics to lose faith in the integrity of investigations. One of the most well-known cases is Haifan Lin, a distinguished cell biology professor at Yale and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. The NIH's suspicion that he did not adequately disclose foreign ties directly resulted in the investigation by the Department of Justice. The case was dropped after hundreds of faculties petitioned.
As a result of Lin’s case, the Asian Faculty Association at Yale was established in 2023, which aims to "promote and protect" its members on campus. Despite being a university-wide organization with over 200 faculty members, its core group members are mostly from the School of Medicine, the vortex center of the NIH investigation.
A map of how NIH co-publication changed from 2019 to 2023
My analysis focused mainly on institutions that have historically shown a high level of U.S.-China collaboration on federally funded biomedical research, which I defined as having at least 100 such papers published between 2017 and 2023.
Of the 185 Chinese institutions with at least 100 NIH-funded research collaborations, 70% co-published fewer papers in 2023 compared to 2019.
On the U.S. side, only 42% of 221 institutions that have more than 100 NIH co-publications with China in ten years have seen a decline in collaboration.
In mainland China, institutions that collaborate with U.S. organizations on NIH projects are primarily universities and hospitals located in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, as well as in the capital cities of other provinces.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, a leading government research institution, collaborated with the U.S. on 2,978 NIH-funded research papers over the past ten years, making it the United States’ largest collaborator in China. However, overall published collaboration with the NIH has declined, dropping from 361 papers in 2018 to 222 in 2023—a nearly 40% decrease since 2018.
Comprehensive research universities like Peking University, Fudan University, and Zhejiang University, rank 3rd, 7th, and 9th in total number of NIH papers and remained at around 200 papers annually, showing no clear downward trend. Although Tsinghua University ranks 11th, its collaborations have decreased by 36% from 2018 to 2023.
For medical universities and hospitals, NIH collaborations between China and the U.S. peaked around 2020 and then declined significantly. Capital Medical University, Peking Union Medical College in Beijing, and Southern Medical University in Guangdong have all seen a decrease of 25-30% since 2018, and they all rank among the top 20 collaborating institutions in China.
Top scientists under “China Initiative” and NIH investigation
Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Sun Yat-sen University rank second and fourth in publishing NIH-funded papers with the U.S. They both have connections to Songguo Zheng, a top scientist who was sentenced to 37 months in prison in 2020 after pleading guilty to making false statements and not disclosing China ties when applying for a $4.1 million NIH grant.
The investigation and imprisonment had a significant impact on Songguo Zheng personally; analysis shows that after 2021, he did not publish a single NIH-funded collaboration paper. On Google Scholar, the number of articles listing him as an author decreased after 2021 but still remained above 2,000 per year.
After his release, Zheng worked at Sun Yat-sen University from 2022 to 2023. Then, he joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University and recruited 8-10 postdoctoral researchers to build his lab. Both two universities have not seen a significant downward trend in NIH co-publication.
Zheng was a director of the Rheumatology and Immunology Center at the Ohio State University when being investigated. The university, which was directly involved, had a decline in cooperation with China.
But Zheng’s two former employers in the U.S. – the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California – both had a steady increase in NIH-funded collaboration with China to 2022, then posted a decline.
Another scientist involved in a "China Initiative" case is Qing Wang, known for breakthroughs in heart disease research at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world's leading research centers. He was accused of making false statements to secure a $3.6 million grant from the NIH, but his case was dismissed in 2021.
At the time of the investigation, Wang was already the dean of the School of Life Science and Technology for Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). The university has seen a large drop of 46% in published NIH-funded collaborations since 2021.
But that didn’t stop Qing Wang from getting support from the HUST. In 2023, Qing Wang was also recruiting postdoctoral fellows to form his own team.
There hasn't been any noticeable impact on the Cleveland Clinic, Wang’s former employer in the U.S.
Github Repo and Methodology of data analysis