Launched in November 2018 by the Trump administration, the China Initiative made administrative procedures more complicated and funding less accessible for collaborative projects between Chinese and US researchers. In this paper, we use information from the Scopus database to analyze how the China Initiative shock affected the volume and quality of Chinese research. We find a negative effect of the Initiative on the average quality of both the publications and the co-authors of Chinese researchers with prior US collaborations compared to Chinese researchers with prior European collaborations. Thus, the Initiative is estimated to have reduced the number of yearly citations for Chinese researchers in the treatment group by 13 percent more than for researchers in the control group. The negative effect of the Initiative has been stronger for Chinese researchers with higher research productivity and/or who worked on US-dominated fields before the shock. Finally, we find no significant effect of the China Initiative on the volume and quality of research of US researchers with prior Chinese collaborations.
Philippe Aghion, Celine Antonin, Luc Paluskiewicz, David Stromberg, Xueping Sun, Raphael Wargon and Karolina Westin
1 June 2023 Paper Number POIDWP073
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