Some lawmakers shooting US in the foot by recruiting informants, excluding researchers: China Daily editorial

There is a spin on the old joke about politics in Washington: If you can't solve a problem, create a committee. If that doesn't work, set up a hotline. The latest punch line is: if the hotline fails, blame it on China.

This sorry state of affairs is exemplified by the United States House Select Committee on China, which stooped to a new low on Tuesday when it asked US students, postdoctoral researchers and academics to report cases in which they believe they were denied research opportunities in favor of applicants from China. In effect, the committee is encouraging them to become McCarthyist informants in a competition over who gets to work in US laboratories and research institutes.

The public reaction has been skeptical, even scathing. One respondent asked whether universities are really choosing "less qualified" Chinese applicants over US citizens. Another dismissed the appeal as "ignorant jingoism". Someone else bluntly asked: "Is enforcing racism the mission statement of the Select Committee on China?"

The committee has overlooked the fact that the US didn't build Silicon Valley, Boston's biotech corridor or its world-class universities by checking passports. It built them by creating an ecosystem in which talent crosses borders, laboratories exchange ideas and ambitious entrepreneurs are drawn to pursue their careers.

Some in Washington now seem determined to turn that competitive advantage into a perceived security vulnerability. In April, the committee established a "whistleblower" email, encouraging US scholars and faculty to report research collaborations involving entities allegedly linked to China's defense and industrial sectors. The committee doesn't realize that there is a vast difference between safeguarding classified systems and treating scientific exchange as suspicious.

The US cannot aspire to win the technology race while scaring away the very people who can help it achieve that goal. The White House lifted restrictions on the use of TikTok on federal government devices on Monday, after finding that the popular social media app no longer poses a "national security threat" following the US administration's coercive deal. Under the new arrangement, ByteDance retains a 19.9 percent stake in the US operations — a far cry from the outright divestiture Washington once demanded, yet sufficient to keep the Chinese parent company as the single largest shareholder in the joint venture. Yet a China-born scientist working alongside an American colleague for US projects can still be deemed suspicious enough to warrant a congressional "red line". What exactly is the committee trying to protect?

A bipartisan group of US senators visited China in May and received a clear message: understand China better, communicate more, manage differences and expand cooperation where possible. Two technologically advanced countries cannot effectively manage competition by severing contact. Even US entrepreneur Elon Musk put it succinctly on X on Tuesday: "China is awesome. I strongly encourage people to visit."

That is a useful thought experiment for the committee. What if its members visited China, Chinese students studied in the US and scientists from both countries collaborated while competing fiercely? In Washington, it seems, that amounts to "espionage".

Some China-hawk lawmakers seem to inhabit a world of their own making — one in which they sit by their inboxes waiting for tips about who supposedly "elbowed" whom out of an opportunity, then turn such allegations into a witch hunt. Policy built on prejudice and suspicion is not statecraft.

Treating collaboration as conspiracy and reducing international research to a crude zero-sum contest is intellectual paranoia dressed in legislative robes. For the US, the real danger is that it will gradually lose the habits that forged its technological edge: openness, curiosity, immigration, competition and the confidence that the best way to beat rivals is to be better than them.

The recent Fields Medal winners, Chinese mathematicians Wang Hong and Deng Yu, both studied at Peking University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their groundbreaking work emerged not in isolation but through international exchanges and collaboration. Mathematical truth knows no passport. A theorem proved in Princeton or Beijing belongs to humanity, not to any nation's geopolitical scorecard. Yet in today's Washington, such common sense is increasingly portrayed as naivete.

The committee may view its McCarthyist mailbox as a weapon against Beijing. But that weapon may ultimately shoot the US in the foot. In the 21st-century knowledge economy, the country that erects the tallest walls around its talent may discover that it has also built a ceiling over its own future.