While China’s own universities now award more natural science and engineering Ph.D.’s than do American schools, the United States remains a favored destination for Chinese graduate students, with applications increasing at an annual rate of close to 20 percent.
It is propelled by the PRC’s drive to upgrade from a manufacturing to an innovation economy by multinational companies eager to tap Chinese R&D talent by faculty and student exchanges and by partnerships forged among and with a burgeoning population of U.S.-trained Chinese engineers and scientists. When you find the right partner, you do business.”īut China’s size, ambition, and emphasis on engineering put the U.S.-Chinese collaboration in a special category. As Emily Ashworth, head of NSF’s Beijing office, puts it, “Scientific research is global. In part, such collaborations reflect the growth of international university and industry research-and-development partnerships, facilitated by ever faster communication networks like the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) and efficient data-sharing organizations such as PRAGMA, the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton drew scant attention in May when she expanded the U.S.-China EcoPartnership to include joint pursuit of clean-energy solutions by the University of California, Los Angeles and Peking University. universities and corporations have links with Chinese partner institutions that announcements of new projects are becoming routine.
A five-year National Science Foundation-backed pursuit of low-carbon, sustainable cities in the United States, India, and China led by environmental engineer Anu Ramaswami of the University of Minnesota, for example, will draw researchers and students from 14 institutions in the three countries. Today, projects vary in size from workshops to multiyear grants of $1 million or more. The partnership began when the two nations renewed diplomatic relations in 1979. Welcome to the strange yet mutually rewarding world of U.S.-Chinese research collaboration, where a global superpower and its dynamic Asian rival team up to advance fields ranging from cyberinfrastructure to nanotechnology, electronics, clean energy, food safety, and language translation technology. Hailed as a success by both sides, the ongoing ocean acoustics partnership held its third international conference in Beijing this past June, drawing 80 papers and nearly 100 participants from 11 countries.
Office of Naval Research and the Chinese Academy of Sciences began working together to probe the acoustical mysteries beneath the Yellow Sea. The year following this menacing encounter, however, the U.S. warplanes over the Yellow Sea and a Chinese nuclear attack submarine came within 21 miles of the U.S. This happened in 1994, when China dispatched fighter jets to intercept U.S.
Occasionally, tensions bring the two countries close to blows. And while China’s expanding navy asserts regional clout, the United States is vying to preserve its Pacific preeminence. As oil tankers and containerships ply commercially vital shipping channels, the People’s Republic of China and its neighbors compete noisily for rocky islets set amid sizable undersea oil and natural gas deposits. Of course, this watery workshop is also a strategic prize. Navy in shielding harbors from terrorists, improving surveillance and mine detection, and designing stealthier submarines for a future conflict on the seas. The findings of these engineers and ocean scientists provide crucial insights to the U.S. No researchers appreciate this maritime laboratory more than experts in acoustics, “the eyes of the submarine world.” For them, the multiple seabed, sediment, and ambient noise levels offer abundant ways to measure how sound and vibrations travel. Hundreds of kilometers wide and just a few hundred meters deep, the continental shelf in the East China, South China, and Yellow seas presents an array of aquatic ecosystems in gently descending depths, amid tidal flows, reefs, a range of temperatures, and varied exposure to sunlight.
Off China’s coast lies a haven for ocean scientists.