Foreign researchers in China face tightening restrictions

Donald Trump’s second term as US president has brought fresh fears that the administration could resurrect the China Initiative, which launched legal cases against scientists from the country in a bid to counter scientific espionage.

In China, too, foreign researchers are navigating an increasingly authoritarian, security-focused environment. They have not faced a targeted campaign such as the China Initiative, and many still feel welcomed in the country. But tough regulations following the COVID-19 pandemic, new data laws and other restrictions pose challenges.

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“There used to be a lot more foreigners, including foreign scientists, in China before COVID,” says an overseas researcher in Beijing, who did not want to be named because of uncertainty about how authorities might react. “So many friends left in the last five years.” But the researcher has a great job, which has kept them from leaving. “I love it here,” they say.

Statistics on foreign researchers in China are hard to come by, but the number is thought to be relatively small. Halldór Berg Harðarson, who lived in Beijing and until last year and ran Euraxess, a platform supporting European researchers in China, has analysed author names on scholarly publications and estimates that there are 5,000 to 10,000 foreign researchers in the country who have a PhD. By contrast, there are estimated to be at least 100,000 foreign scholars at this level in the United States.

Lockdown worries

The Chinese government’s strict management of the pandemic is one reason this number is low and has fallen over the past few years. China prevented foreigners who left from returning during parts of 2020, and imposed ultra-strict lockdown measures in 2022. “The way that they dealt with it from the beginning was not very conducive to keeping foreign talent,” says Harðarson, who now lives in Brussels. He returned to Europe for family and career reasons.

A Euraxess survey found that by autumn 2022, 40–50% of foreign academics had left China, compared with 2019 figures. “It became very restrictive, really quickly,” says Harðarson. “That was a big factor.”

The anonymous researcher in Beijing recalls health officials calling in the middle of the night demanding that they take a new COVID-19 test after their previous test results were inconclusive.

The pandemic was “quite tough”, says another foreign academic in southern China, who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely without needing approval from his research institution. The researcher says that foreigners experienced hostility because they were thought to be more likely to be infected with COVID-19 — for instance, some residents avoided sitting next to them on public transport. (China’s Ministry of Science and Technology did not respond to Nature’s request for comment about concerns about the impact of pandemic lockdowns.)

The COVID-19 response gave foreign researchers a “dramatic realization” of how much control the Chinese state could exert, says Kārlis Rokpelnis, a Beijing-based social scientist with 15 years’ experience in China, who runs Euraxess and spoke to Nature in a personal capacity.

Data laws

What’s more, over the past decade, China has implemented security-focused laws that have increased “vigilance” over whether academics in China can send potentially sensitive research overseas, says Annina Lattu, an open-science researcher at Peking University in Beijing. Many countries have data regulations. “But China’s laws, I would say, sit on the strictest and most ambiguous end of the spectrum.”

Uncertainty over these laws has scuppered some joint research projects. “I’ve heard about collaboration projects that didn’t pan out, because they were not able to reach a clear understanding with their Chinese counterparts,” says Harðarson.

For example, China’s Data Security Law, which covers all data types, including research data, can require official clearance to send certain information outside China. There is an exemption for academic data, unless they contain personal information or are deemed “important”; these require official checks before being exported. But what counts as “important” hasn’t yet been clarified, says Rogier Creemers, a specialist on Chinese data laws at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

So far, the laws have mostly affected researchers working with medical data, says Rokpelnis. “I haven’t met anyone who said, ‘Oh, I wasn’t able to do my experiment,’” he says.

VPN troubles

As in some other countries, posters warning of foreign spies have appeared in some Chinese research organizations, with a tip-off phone number. “The bad guy in the poster looked a lot like me,” says the researcher in southern China, recalling signage in his workplace. But, he says, “I haven’t felt anything about people accusing me of espionage.” In his experience, the Chinese companies he works with are less guarded about intellectual property than some UK firms he’s collaborated with.