US–China tensions appear to be damaging countries’ science, analysis finds

Increasing geopolitical tensions between the US and China are having a damaging impact on global science, according to recent analysis from the US National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER).

The report concludes that the US Department of Justice’s investigations into ethnically Chinese scientists under the now defunct China Initiative – created during the Trump administration to crack down on Chinese state-backed espionage – may have harmed their productivity. The paper finds that ethnically Chinese graduate students became 16% less likely to attend a US-based PhD programme between 2016 and 2019. Those that did were 4% less likely to stay in the US after graduation. In both instances, these students were more likely to move to a non-US anglophone country instead.