White House requests extension of agreement with China on joint research

President Joe Biden’s administration has given itself 6 months to reach a deal with China to preserve a 44-year-old agreement governing scientific cooperation between the two superpowers. But the rising tensions between the two countries and calls by congressional Republicans for the United States to end cooperation with China will require the White House to walk a political tightrope in renewing what has traditionally been a garden-variety diplomatic pact. U.S. academics welcome the administration’s decision, first reported by NBC News , not to abandon an agreement that has been renewed in 5-year increments by both Republican and Democratic presidents since then–Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping and U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed it in 1979. They argue the U.S. has benefited as much as China in conducting joint basic research on topics ranging from reducing infant mortality to combating climate change. There’s no reason to abandon those efforts, they add. “I’m delighted by this result,” says physicist John Holdren of Harvard University, who served as the science adviser to former President Barack Obama. In 2011, Holdren helped negotiate a 5-year extension of the Agreement Between the United States and China on Cooperation in Science and Technology , also known as the STA. The pact “says that it’s OK with the U.S. government that we collaborate on science and technology with China, with appropriate selectivity and management. ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news