NYT, Nature highlight new geopolitical, technopolitical problems in US-China relations
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0230
The prominent front-page placement of a New York Times article on 17 November might seem to suggest that President Obama’s dispatching of 2500 Marines to Australia was the news for the day about US–China relations. After all, a Washington Post piece that same day declared that the strategic move has China “feeling at once isolated, criticized, encircled and increasingly like a target of US moves.” But that day’s edition of Nature offered some not entirely unrelated US–China news as well – news concerning problems in space-science collaboration.
Building on the companion-piece Nature news report “China forges ahead in space” and citing Nature‘s earlier article “US row threatens Chinese links: Dispute intensifies over a ban on some types of scientific cooperation with China,” Nature warns in a 17 November editorial that a US “refusal to collaborate with China on space science is short-sighted and misguided, from both a scientific and a pragmatic standpoint.”
Nature summarizes possible areas of collaboration—for example, in studies of space weather and of Earth’s magnetosphere and in the planned launch of an orbiting x-ray observatory. The magazine cites China’s “string of high-profile space successes in recent years, including this month’s ‘heavenly kiss’ of two unmanned orbiters, Shenzhou-8 and Tiangong-1.” It reports that in July in Beijing, the Chinese Academy of Sciences opened a National Space Science Center.
But the editorial laments,
Restrictions on the interaction of US scientists with their counterparts in China have been tightened to the point at which even having meetings could be considered illegal. Led by congressman Frank Wolf (Republican, Virginia), the United States has legislated and looks set to enforce a broad ban on collaborations with China on programmes funded by the Office of Science and Technology Policy or NASA. As recent high-level legal action demonstrates, Wolf is aiming to enforce the ban even on meetings between scientists from the two countries. ...
Of course, it is right that the United States should be careful. There are justified fears of reverse engineering, and the country should collaborate on projects that would not put nationally sensitive technology at risk. But it should also be sensible and keep the doors of communication open. A blanket ban on sharing not just scientific missions but also ideas will hurt the United States more than China.
The editors quote Wolf on his perspective in the matter: “China is taking a more assertive posture globally, and their interests rarely intersect with ours.” Chinese officials condemn that language as calling to mind the cold war — and they add, “The perspective is worse.”
—-
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the Media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.