In an essay for Scientific American, KC Cole looks at the aftermath of the United States’ China Initiative, which was designed to ferret out cases of economic espionage and other misdeeds by China in the U.S. but had the side effect of disrupting productive international research collaborations and chasing away valued Chinese researchers from U.S. institutions. Cole pulls from her own experience in covering international scientific collaborations and witnessing previous politically driven crackdowns in science to advocate for keeping scientific channels open between countries whose political relationships become fraught.
