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Zuoyue Wang¹One of Wang’s mentors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the early 1980s was the scientist and dissident Fang Lizhi is a distinguished scholar and a professor of history at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he specializes in the history of modern science and its interaction with U.S. and Chinese government policy. Wang, who grew up in China’s Henan Province, earned a B.S. in physics at Henan Normal University, a Master’s at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also won a National Science Foundation grant to study Chinese-American scientists during the Cold War and beyond. And he is the author of In Sputnik’s Shadow, which traces the role of scientific advisors during the Cold War. The following is a lightly edited transcript of his interview. 

Q: Today, more than 300,000 Chinese students attend American colleges and universities. Tell us a little about the beginning of Chinese coming to study in the United States?

A: There were Chinese who came on their own in the mid 19th century, in association with American missionaries in China. Also in the late 19th century, the Qing [Dynasty] government sent dozens of young Chinese students, who were not even at college but the equivalent of high school students. They quickly became Americanized, to the alarm of the conservatives in the Qing court. So a few years after it started the whole experiment was terminated. Nevertheless, out of that came some of the early leaders of China’s engineering and naval enterprises. 

The Boxer Rebellion, in 1900, was a tragedy for Chinese and for foreigners in China. But the settlement [The Boxer Protocol, signed in 1901, led to large payments for damages paid by China to a group of foreign nations, including Russia, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.] resulted in China sending more than a thousand elite Chinese students to the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century. This was based on the surplus payment China was forced to make to the United States. The U.S. government made it a condition that the Chinese government use the money to send students to the U.S. mainly for “solid learning.” That meant science and engineering, which was agreed to by both China and the United States. The first group came in 1909. That’s also how Tsinghua University, now a top university in China, was founded. Tsinghua is a feeder school for many of America’s top graduate schools, but it was started as a result of the overpayment of the Boxer Indemnity. 

So, in essence, the Chinese government helped American universities by sending these Chinese students to study in the U.S., right?

Yes. The Boxer [Scholarship] fund made payments to U.S. universities in the form of tuition and living expenses for these so-called Boxer fellows. The Boxer program also set a pattern in that a majority of the Chinese students who came to the U.S. to study in the 20th century would major in science and engineering, or the applied side, not the arts and humanities.

It’s ironic that given where we are now, with the previous administration saying that Chinese students, and perhaps some faculty, might be spies, that the U.S. government in this earlier period encouraged engagement centered around educating Chinese here in the U.S., right? And this came even after the U.S. had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and later made other efforts to restrict Chinese immigration in the U.S. 

I was recently looking at the work of the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) under Barack Obama. They issued a report in 2012, in which they argued that it’s really important for the U.S. to invest in science, technology, and higher education and to reform immigration policy so that the U.S. can continue to attract international talents. And then before that, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report in 2007 that articulated the idea that in order for the U.S. to stay at the forefront in the world economy, especially the innovation economy, the U.S. needed to attract international talents, including those from China and India. So you can see that under both Bush and Obama, when the perception of the threat of the rise of China was widespread, at least some policy makers and scholars were still thinking about the need for the U.S. to attract international talents, including from China.

So in the early part of the 20th century, a significant number of Chinese students studied on American campuses… 

Yes, the Boxer program continued from about 1909 all the way to 1949, and students also came from China to the U.S. based on other sources of funding. In some sense, the Boxer [Scholarship fund] program continued after 1949 because some of the money was used to fund the Tsinghua University in Taiwan [after the Nationalists fled there in 1949]. There’s even an institute in New York called the “China Institute in America,” which still exists. Now, it’s a nonprofit organization serving the community, but it had its origins in that Boxer [Scholarship] fund and was established in 1926 to assist the Boxer fellows. 

Of course, the Nationalist government in Taiwan also put in money to fund the new university in Taiwan [Tsinghua]. But when it first started, it was partly based on that funding, and partly based on the American “Atoms for Peace” program. In the 1950s the U.S. provided nuclear reactors and accelerators to help other countries to start peaceful nuclear research in the hope that they would not pursue military nuclear research. And so Taiwan used that aid, and the Boxer funding, to establish its own Tsinghua University.

Things changed, though, after the communists took over mainland China, in 1949. Those exchanges ended, right?

Yes. In 1949, there were about 5,000 Chinese students in the U.S., because of a big wave that had come to study after World War II. Many came after the end of the war with the support of the Nationalist government. But after the communists took over mainland China in 1949, the students had to make a decision. The U.S. tried to persuade Chinese students to stay in the U.S., to show that they chose the U.S. side of the Cold War instead of the other side, the Soviet camp. In some cases, the U.S. government even used coercion to forbid Chinese students from going back to China after ‘49. That policy was in place for most Chinese students and intensified during the Korean War for those who studied science and engineering. It only ended in 1955, after the Geneva conferences. Besides the ideological struggle, the U.S. needed those Chinese scientists to stay and become part of American technical manpower because there was a shortage of well-trained talents. So about 4,000 Chinese scientists stayed in the U.S. In many ways, that allowed them to develop professionally and take advantage of a better working and living environment than their classmates or friends who went back to China. About 1,300 chose to go back to China, for a variety of reasons; not all because they were communists; many had families or spouses or children back in China. Some were motivated by patriotism because they felt that they owed something to China. So those who stayed watched what happened to their friends who went back and many of the latter suffered during political campaigns in mainland China. 

Besides the 4,000 Chinese students who chose to stay in the U.S., about 3,000 highly trained Chinese professionals also came to the U.S. in the 1950s as refugees from the Chinese civil war, via Hong Kong. It was very dramatic: The 1,300 Chinese students going back to China were probably on the boat going one way. And then, on the return boat, you had the refugee intellectuals who were coming to the U.S. Also, there were at least a few documented cases where people who went back to China in the ‘50s returned to the U.S. [After all,] Zhou Enlai had promised them that they [Chinese students who were asked to return to China] were free to come and free to leave. Some tried to take up Zhou’s offer, and a couple apparently succeeded in getting out of China after the famine in the 1950s and early 1960s. But in general, very few did, and there was very little movement of people between the U.S. and China from 1949 to 1971. 

Even before diplomatic relations were officially restored between the U.S. and China in 1979, there was already talk about students from what had been known as “Red China” coming to study in the U.S., right? 

Talks about sending students to the U.S. went hand in hand with talks about [formal] diplomatic relations. The Chinese side, to a certain extent, used the approval for Chinese students to come to the U.S. as a bargaining chip with the Carter administration. “If you re-establish diplomatic relations, we will send our students to the U.S.” This shows that the U.S. has long wanted to have Chinese students here.

Why was the U.S. so eager to have Chinese students?

There are several reasons. First, if you go back to the long sweep of U.S.-China relations, there was what historians call “the missionary impulse” to change China. That goes back at least to the 19th century, when American missionaries went to China in large numbers, trying to reform Chinese society in the American model. That’s a part of the motivation. 

But there was also the brilliance of the earlier Chinese students who came to the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s. Of those that stayed you had several Nobel Prize winners, and leaders from many fields. The American academic leaders knew how good the Chinese students could be. They were hoping to have more. Chinese American physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang won the Nobel Prize in 1957 for their work done in the U.S., which brought a lot of credit to the U.S. during the height of the Cold War. By the way, that’s just a few weeks after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite. 

There was an incentive to attract the best and the brightest from China. The U.S. was already attracting students from around the world. And in the 1970s, with the Civil Rights movement, there was this idea of encouraging diversity. We had already passed that period of the Chinese Exclusion Act. That probably also played a part in the U.S. being more open to students from China. Also, China was viewed as going through a reform phase even before the end of the Cultural Revolution. They were going to relax political control. And when Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, the signal was even more pronounced: China was going on a Western-oriented reform effort, a market-based reform, so American policymakers were encouraging that. And lastly, there were economic considerations as well, especially as we moved further into the 1980s. There was this idea that closer ties between the U.S. and China could help open the Chinese market for American products. And that was openly advocated by President Reagan’s administration. It supported measures to attract Chinese students. 

But weren’t there also U.S. government suspicions in the 1950s about Chinese students or scholars taking military secrets back to China?

This speaks to the duality in the U.S.-China scientific/educational relations. Earlier, we talked about the positive benefits that Americans saw in bringing Chinese scientists to the U.S. But American officials involved with national security issues were concerned with military secrets. They worried that scientific interactions with China would benefit Chinese military strength. This has always been there. It was clearly there during the Korean War. That’s why the U.S. government made a decision not to allow Chinese students who studied science and engineering to go back to China for several years. It was essentially a forced detention. Even those who decided to stay in the U.S. were under constant surveillance. Now, the more we learn about the FBI’s programs in that regard, the more we learn about the extent of that surveillance, not only on those Chinese scientists who had originally come from mainland China, but even those Chinese students who came from Taiwan. In the 1950s and the 1960s, they were put under the same surveillance program by the FBI. So there was that duality, both the benefits and the risks that the American government saw in U.S.-China scientific interactions. It also spoke to the duality in U.S.-China relations in broad terms. 

We now know that when China was relatively weak economically, and when China was viewed as a potential counterbalance to the Soviet Union, the U.S. had less concern about helping China [develop technologically]. But after the Cold War ended, in the early 1990s, and as China’s economy grew stronger, that equation began to shift. Worries began to take over the thinking more than the expectation of a benefit, although the benefit has continued. As you know, several years ago General Motors was reported to have made more profit in China than in the American market. Things like that show that U.S.-China relations are different from the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

Was there concern back then that American universities risked exposing their classified or military research on campus to foreigners?

Before the 1960s, there was some classified research going on at American universities. For example, MIT had the Draper Laboratories doing research on missile guidance for the U.S. military. But as a result of the Vietnam War protests in the 1960s, many universities decided to separate themselves from classified military research.

If there’s no longer much classified research on campus these days, what is the chief concern?

This is a key question, and there are several layers there. One is how science and technology have been transformed, beginning in the 1970s. Before that, the leading technologies were nuclear technology and the space program — big tech. But since then we’ve seen the rise of information technology, and the PC revolution and chips, not just for civilian use but for military applications. Information technology has really become a key item in the policymaking realm. We’ve also seen the rise of biotechnology and genetic engineering. 

And so the boundary between science, technology and even [the] defense [industry] has been blurred. Before that, you could say “this is open basic science and that is closed classified technology.” But after the 1970s, the boundary between pure and applied science was blurred. Is genetic engineering science or technology? And you have the so-called export control, which is a broader area of concern and covers many subjects of sensitive, though not classified, information. And so for universities, it’s not easy to have clear guidelines. Today, that’s one of the major complaints from universities, that the U.S. government is asking them to protect research and strengthen security but without very clear guidelines. With classified work, it’s clear: don’t touch it or don’t teach it. But now export controls are evolving; and the boundaries are not so clear. And that debate goes back at least to the 1980s when universities fought for clear guidelines to follow. 

What influence did the Soviet Union have on Chinese higher education during the Cold War?  

Well, the 1950s, as I and some other historians have called it, was the decade of Sovietization of Chinese science and technology. There was a massive amount of technical and scientific aid from the Soviet Union to China, and that extended beyond hardware or knowledge, extending into institutions. Chinese universities like Tsinghua University, which was one of the leading liberal arts schools and an all-around university, was in the 1950s turned into a technical school with just purely engineering on the Soviet model, to the dismay of many of its alumni or faculty members. You began to have colleges like the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics — which under the name “Beihang University” still exists today — with specialized programs. Soviet influence was far reaching in the 1950s. Even after the Sino-Soviet split around 1960, that influence has continued. But the American influence picked up after the 1970s. And now you have generations of Chinese students who studied in the U.S. and then went back to China. And so that’s another part of the relationship that today often gets overlooked. 

Given programs like the China Initiative, run by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, there is this perception of Chinese students in the U.S. as potential spies, and the focus is often on their negative effects on the U.S. But many of these Chinese students, even if they went back to China, often brought American influence back to China. That’s their network. They know how to do science the American way and their contacts are with American scientists and former classmates. They end up bringing closer ties between Chinese and American scientists and businesses as well. How many American businesses are benefiting from American-educated Chinese students who return to China? And more broadly, I would argue that they brought with them the liberalizing influence back into China too. Many of them have tried to reform the Chinese system.

What is the role of basic research in these debates about whether or not there should be cross-border collaboration between the U.S. and China?

For China, one of the big obstacles to its development is the lack of progress on basic research. Everyone realizes that’s the source of breakthrough innovations. China has done relatively well in applied research and technological developments. But in real breakthroughs, or world changing innovations, China still lags behind the U.S. and several other countries and the Chinese government recognizes that. So they are trying to promote basic research, something President Obama’s science advisors recognized as a common good for the global community. 

Basic research is all openly published. And we need to have more of this common good. It’s like the atmosphere, or the pasture next to the village, where everybody takes their sheep to graze but nobody owns it; but if the pasture dies, everyone suffers. Obama’s science advisors used the same analogy for basic research; because it’s open to everyone, there’s less incentive for any government or company to invest in it. The U.S. used to invest the largest share in basic research in the 1950s and 1960s because the U.S. occupied 50 percent of the global economy. But now the U.S. economy is only about a quarter of the world economy and China and India can benefit as much from basic research. So the Obama administration talked about global collaboration to promote basic research. That’s why I think we should encourage China to invest in basic research. 

But there’s another interesting dimension, and that is its potential effect on social and political reform. To encourage basic research, you need to encourage critical thinking if you want to succeed. And think of the implications of that. If they [the Chinese government] set up institutions and reform the culture and educational system to encourage basic research they will have to go into that direction to encourage independent thinking, critical thinking. And that’s going to be good for Chinese social and political development and U.S.-China relations in the long run. 

Is there really a liberalizing influence that comes from studying overseas, or here in the U.S.? 

We read about criticisms of the U.S. by some of those who recently returned from the U.S. to China. In the 1950s many returnees made similar criticisms of American McCarthyism and racism. But in practice returnees often would advocate Chinese science and educational policies closer to the American model than to the Soviet one then prevailing in China. Many returnees would also become leaders in re-establishing China-U.S. scientific and educational ties in the 1970s and 1980s. A large number of them would also assist, or at least consent, to their children’s plans to study and stay in the U.S. in the 1980s.  

Lately, there have been growing signs of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S., unfortunately. Is that affecting the willingness of Chinese students to attend American universities?

I am sure that the recent rise in [anti-Asian] hate crimes in the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic has had negative effects on Chinese students’ willingness to come to study in the U.S., but “how much” will depend on how the U.S. government and universities react to the problem, and how long the pandemic lasts. The U.S.’s tightened visa policy after 9/11 in 2001 resulted in a sharp drop in Chinese students coming to the U.S., but after protests and intervention by the National Academy of Sciences and university leaders, the policy was reversed and the numbers of Chinese students in the U.S. soon surpassed those in the pre-9/11 days.    

For much of the past decade, a growing number of prominent scholars from the U.S. began teaching and setting up research labs in China. And more and more Chinese scholars came to the U.S. Now, that seems to be crumbling. What happened?

That’s one of the key questions now haunting universities in the U.S., and universities in China too. They’re worried about the cut off in scientific and educational exchanges that may have a negative impact on American and Chinese scientific and educational development. On a broad level, U.S.-China relations have always impacted U.S.-China scientific relations and educational exchange. Sometimes, you have a pattern where one activity was encouraged in some periods and then it would be turned around to become a liability for those who were involved in that activity. 

During the Obama years, for example, the U.S. government encouraged scientific exchanges and collaboration, especially in fields like climate change and clean energy. The U.S. tried to get China to take climate change seriously, and to help develop clean energy technology. But then, in the last five or so years, China has  made progress in the clean energy industry, with wind and solar, and it has become a competitor with American companies. And that has kind of changed the tone of the government [with regard to] interactions in that field. 

In terms of Chinese talents programs, like the famous Thousand Talents Program, there was some cooperation but mostly in basic research. And they attracted not just Chinese-American scientists but non-ethnic Chinese scientists as well. Again, in the early days, in the spirit of encouraging basic research and international collaboration, the universities in the U.S. were encouraging their faculty to become internationally involved. But in the last few years, starting with the Obama presidency and intensifying during the Trump years, such activities have been looked upon with increasing suspicion.  

What is the situation with the Thousand Talents program, Beijing’s program to attract foreign scholars to work at Chinese universities? Why is the U.S. so worried about it? Is it even still operating?

I have not studied or monitored this program closely but it should still be ongoing. Because the U.S. has targeted recruits of that program, it’s become low key. It may be continued under some other name. Under the China Initiative, some Chinese American scientists have been arrested and there have been some guilty pleas in those cases. But from my reading of the press reports, most of those guilty pleas or convictions derive from non disclosure or violations of the rules rather than espionage for China. I don’t know whether they have found real evidence of military espionage. 

…I do feel strongly that we need to talk about the need to protect the human rights and civil rights of all Americans, including Chinese American scientists, as violations of rights can happen to any of us. The rule of law and the protection of constitutional rights need to be reiterated and followed.

As historians, we often don’t quite know what’s going on currently — we don’t have the perspective that comes with the passing of time, nor do we have access to non-public information. We talk about learning lessons from history, which is not always easily done. But I do feel strongly that we need to talk about the need to protect the human rights and civil rights of all Americans, including Chinese American scientists, as violations of rights can happen to any of us. The rule of law and the protection of constitutional rights need to be reiterated and followed. And so there is a potential danger in targeting a country or ethnicity with a program like “the China Initiative” — the danger of racial profiling and the danger of discrimination based on national origins, which is explicitly forbidden by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

For the past few years now, the U.S. government, especially the FBI, has been investigating American universities, looking at everything from influence campaigns and donations to so-called spies on campus, with the purpose of stopping those seeking to take American intellectual property and perhaps dual use technologies back to China unlawfully. While some of these cases are legitimate, there are grave concerns about whether this effort has gone too far, whether it is a form of racial profiling, and how harmful it might be to academic freedom. How do you see it?

I hear some of the concerns and read news reports about what’s happening with Chinese American scientists [on U.S. campuses]. The chilling effect seems very real. Publicity about a few cases of conviction or investigation is having an intimidatory effect on many of those who probably, by all accounts, have followed the rules. We read about how people charged with espionage were convicted instead of tax evasion. That may send a signal that Chinese American scientists are under threat. We have seen reports of some Chinese American scientists giving up their American positions and moving back to China amidst the tension in bilateral relations. The Biden administration seems to be trying to moderate the trend. 

What drove some of the Chinese American scientists to accept offers from the Thousand Talents programs and other talent programs in China was a lack of investment in the U.S. in science and education. Federal funding for R&D has been essentially flat for a long time, just keeping up with inflation, while Chinese funding has been going up like 25 percent each year. I was attending a webinar and one of the Chinese American scientists on it said one year he lost his grant application in the U.S., so he had no choice but to accept the offer to go to China to continue his scientific research. And so I think the Biden administration is pushing through Congress now a big package to increase funding for the National Science Foundation, and for other science agencies that will help overall in the funding of science and education, including higher education, in the U.S. The strategy may be not so much to stop Chinese scientists in the U.S. from going back to China but to attract them to come here and to stay.²Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, on July 13, made his own statement about recruiting top talents and encouraging them to stay, see here. And also of course we should all recognize the need for international scientific collaboration, including that between the U.S. and China, in order to solve global problems.

If you had a chance to offer advice to the Biden administration, what would it be? 

As a historian, I am reluctant to offer policy advice. But there are some things that should be clearly stated, especially by the U.S. government. First, we talked about non discrimination, which should be a given, but this should be repeated often. It is not just Chinese Americans but all Asian Americans who can get hit hard with suspicion. So the need is there to reiterate American values. That’s important, not only just in terms of rhetoric but also in terms of actual experience of Chinese Americans and Asian Americans. 

And second, as I mentioned earlier, the U.S. government should increase its investment in science and engineering. It will do a lot to help the U.S. attract more international talents to the U.S.. Thirdly, it is incumbent on the government to take the lead in clarifying the rules on what scientists who are involved in international exchange should follow. Perhaps they should get the National Academy of Sciences, as a kind of representative body of the scientific community, to have input. The NSF has already commissioned the so-called Jason group of independent scientists to write a report on this. In it they advocated that in basic research openness should be a given. The Jason group has argued that what most people do on a university campus is basic research and should be open, subject only to the limit of classification. University administrators should educate the faculty — not only Chinese Americans but all the faculty — and have a very clear set of rules as to how they should behave in international scientific exchanges. They should reiterate the importance of such exchanges for solving global problems. 

The reiteration of the basic principles is important at every level. Maybe that’s where we historians can make some contributions, by reminding people that American science has got to where it is today not because we stayed by ourselves, not by following an “America first” policy. No, it didn’t work that way. We benefited from the refugees from Nazi Germany, for example, and from immigration from China, from India, from Europe after World War II. And we’ve benefitted from this huge immigration wave in the last 30 to 40 years as well. American science has led the world because of these international connections.

What are the consequences of this effort to root out spies or intellectual property theft, and to more closely monitor Chinese presence on American campuses?

If you go back a little to the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in 2020 the era of engagement with China was over; it’s a new Cold War, Cold War 2.0. The danger of making this analogy between the U.S. and China now and the U.S. and Soviets then, is that it tends to make it a zero sum game. But the relationship between the U.S. and China is such a complex and important one. I don’t think a zero sum kind of view is going to make it work for the U.S. or for the world. There are so many areas where it’s required that the U.S. and China collaborate to solve global problems. You think of climate change as one. Think of public health emergencies, like Covid-19, as another one; and nuclear weapons too. [President] Biden recently reiterated, in his talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin, that neither side wants nuclear war. It’s the same dynamics working between the U.S. and China as two nuclear powers. So, the U.S. and China have a complex relationship that demands mature leadership on both sides. I’m not just saying this for the U.S. side but the Chinese side as well. Both sides should recognize that there are things they need to do together to solve global problems. The relationship has to be one with nuance, not black and white, and with a clear recognition that there may not be easy solutions. We should also be aware of how this type of international rivalry may end up impacting Chinese Americans and Asian Americans.

But aren’t there real concerns the U.S. government has about scientists who take federal research money to work on sensitive projects then setting up labs in China or sharing that knowledge with the Chinese government, and perhaps the Chinese military? What should be done to address these concerns?

This goes back to my earlier point about the need for the U.S. government to educate American scientists and other academics involved in international scientific exchanges with China, and also with other countries —  collaborations, for example, with Russian and Iranian scientists. I’m sure that that goes on too. Everyone needs to recognize the risks involved in international scientific collaborations, and to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits. That’s always going to be a balancing act because we should not lose sight of the potential threat to the U.S. interest in international interactions. It’s real. And so the FBI has its job and other national security agencies have their jobs. They need to do their duty. But it’s a matter of balancing. The job of the government is to balance the cost and benefits, and to give clear guidance to American scientists involved in these international interactions.

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