The displacement effects of US-China political tensions on China’s international and domestic research collaboration: evidence from the “China initiative”

This paper investigates the impact on US-China academic collaboration of the “China Initiative” program launched by the Trump administration in November 2018. It adopts the difference-in-difference method to analyse data of the world’s top 29 innovative countries over the period of 2016–2022. It is shown that US-China academic collaboration suffered significantly due to this program. Furthermore, the impact goes beyond the US-China bilateral partnership as this program also affects other key scientific collaboration between China and some advanced economies. An analysis of disciplinary heterogeneity shows that the impact was particularly evident in the fields of nature science, engineering, as well as those have no clear links with national security such as medical and health sciences. However, our empirical evidence also demonstrates that, after the announcement of the “China Initiative", both domestic academic collaboration in China and international collaboration between China and non-western countries experienced rapid growth.