How coronavirus scientists offer a formula for better US-China relations
- As American and Chinese officials meet this week, they can take inspiration from the collaboration and healthy competition happening between their scientists
Another group of over 130 doctors, scientists and others working on vaccines made a public pledge to strengthen “unprecedented worldwide collaboration”.
The professional partnership and personal friendship between the two men can be traced back to the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2003 when Dr Lipkin and two American colleagues were the first foreign medical experts to arrive in Beijing as the city was shrouded in panic.
Lipkin brought nucleic acid reagents, with which he and Chinese epidemiologists quickly concluded that Sars was a viral infection, thus helping develop a strategy for containing the virus and curtailing deaths.
By helping establish the Institut Pasteur in Shanghai, the new national Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing and the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Lipkin has contributed significantly to China’s public health infrastructure.
American medical and professional assistance to China, as exemplified by Lipkin’s courageous work, has enhanced Chinese lab research and virus detection capacity. Its positive effects extend far beyond China’s borders.
Many of China’s leading epidemiologists have studied and worked in the US, including members of Dr Zhong’s team. Gao Fu, director general of China’s CDC, received his PhD in molecular virology at the University of Oxford and conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University. Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist of the CDC, received his PhD in epidemiology at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he has also taught for many years.
In the past year, institutions in the two countries have continued and sometimes started joint research projects.
Examples include the institutional collaboration on pathogenic mechanism, clinical treatment and vaccine development between Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health and Harvard Medical School, on vaccine research between Fudan University and the Baylor College of Medicine at the University of Texas, and on sharing public health information in response to the pandemic between the US National Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
At the individual level, Chinese and American scientists have collaborated on information collection and sharing, joint scholarly articles and webinars on Covid-19. For example, the Covid-19 dashboard produced by Johns Hopkins University is run by an American professor and her China-born students.
A study of academic papers related to Covid-19 found that Chinese scientists collaborated with their American peers 2.7 times more than they did with British scientists, their second-most common partners. Another study reported that the number of co-authored scholarly publications on Covid-19 by American and Chinese scholars “is 1.7 times higher than the two countries with the second highest collaboration rate, the US and Canada”.
As early as March 2020, the Chinese Association of Respiratory Physicians and the American College of Chest Physicians organised a two-day virtual programme. The Michigan University Medical School and Peking University Medical School, and The Brookings Institution and Tsinghua University, also organised similar dialogues.
Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser on Covid-19 to US President Joe Biden, said in a conversation with Zhong Nanshan and others: “We have been successful in the past by global cooperation with smallpox, polio, and measles. There is no reason in the world why we cannot do the same thing with Covid-19.”
As senior leaders in both countries plan for their first meeting since Biden took office, they should remember that there is already a solid and dynamic foundation of cooperation among medical professionals and other communities on which both governments can build.
While competition is necessary and inevitable in the relationship, it should not come at the expense of much needed cooperation in some areas, especially saving lives.
Cheng Li is director and senior fellow of the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center and the author of the forthcoming book Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping US-China Engagement. Senqi Ma is a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs