Society‐To‐Society Collaboration Between the United States and China: A Path Forward

On behalf of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA), we write as soil scientists concerned with maintaining and strengthening open science with international collaborators, including our counterparts in China. Our discipline deals with finding the best ways to promote crop production for global food security, with managing soil carbon to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to enhance land-based carbon sequestration, with developing new methods to identify and remediate soils contaminated with toxic metals and organic wastes, with improving water quality by limiting erosion and excessive fertilizer use, with producing nutritional and safe food, with enhancing biodiversity, and much more for the greater good. As for many other scientific disciplines, US soil science has benefited enormously from the contributions of Chinese students and scholars since the US-China Science and Technology Agreement (STA) (Sutter & Sargent, 2023; US Department of State, 2021) was established over 40 years ago. The STA was recently extended to allow for negotiating a new agreement (Mervis, 2023). We were glad to support the thousand US academics who signed a letter in August 2023 urging President Biden to renegotiate and extend the agreement (Kivelson & Michelson, 2023). We are nearing the end of that extension, and we remain hopeful that it will lead to a solid path for future collaboration and communication. As tensions between the US and China over trade, technology, and military and cyber security have grown, scientific exchange between the two countries has slowed (Wagner & Cai, 2022). Differences between the US and China are significant, and they have led to recent national and state-level policies that are designed to limit economic and national security risks. But they also can affect science in counterproductive ways, for example, by limiting the approval of visas for students and researchers (Executive Office of the President, 2020) and restricting research partnerships and exchange agreements that are funded by Chinese agencies (Quin, 2023). For example, Florida's current law (2023 Bill 846) prohibits universities in Florida from accepting grants from or participating in partnerships or agreements with colleges or universities based in China and prohibits hiring of graduate assistants and post-doctoral researchers who are Chinese nationals with very few exceptions (Legislature of the State of Florida, 2023). We believe that it is vital for the STA to be renegotiated with appropriate boundaries to protect intellectual property and national security (Cohen, 2023). But the STA should also provide guidelines about the kinds of basic and applied science for which collaborative efforts are needed for human societies to cope with global environmental and agricultural issues of the present century. Academic institutions, dedicated to education and research for the benefit of all, provide the bedrock foundation for scientific progress and innovation. While the economic and security risks of traditional open science are justly becoming better recognized, we are convinced that there exist scientific fields where the risks of collaboration, sharing of data and models, agreement on research protocols, and exchange of students and scholars are manageable. Collaboration and communication across national boundaries are essential not only for basic sciences like physics and chemistry but also for science that is focused on climate change, agriculture, forestry, and environmental issues of all kinds—which are also considered fundamental research according to National Security Decision Directive 189 (JASON, 2019; The White House, 1985). We are confident that a spirit of collaboration and innovation can be preserved with careful regard for sensitive technologies and security issues (Colglazier, 2023; Lester et al., 2023). To that end, in the last 2 years SSSA and the Soil Science Society of China (SSSC) have sought to strengthen our ties by establishing standing committees that are focused on promoting joint society memberships, producing joint webinars, organizing joint sessions in annual meetings, and developing joint publications. Perhaps such society-to-society engagement is a model that other scientific societies would want to explore. SSSA's initiatives with our Chinese colleagues are consistent with the US State Department's goals for managing the US—China relationship with regard to climate change and food security (US Department of State, 2023a) as well as with the US-China agreement on climate change that was signed in Glasgow in 2021 (US Department of State, 2021) and the joint Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis in 2023 (US Department of State, 2023b). They offer one path to maintaining scientific communication that is in the common interest not only of both countries but of all humanity. We are grateful for the cooperation and good will of our counterparts in the Soil Science Society of China. Data were not used, nor created for this research.