[joyj2nd]

"scientists are not in the business of filling reports, but doing research."

You obviously have never worked in science.

"If you get money from the USA, there is no law saying that you cannot get money from China."

The USA does not give money to you. The NIH does. Darpa too and many others. This government institutions have their own rules and regulations.

"The science is the same and the money is the same. What the US is trying to do is to stop innovation and criminalize the collaboration with Chinese institutions."

The US is trying to control the hemorrhaging outflow of US taxpayer funded research.

[mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE]

How is it hemorrhaging, if it's scientific research that usually gets published in public journals? Or are we talking about top-secret atomic research?

[godelski]

As others have mentioned about different levels of research having different levels of secrecy let me tell you about some of the research I've done.

I work in HPC and people are getting into machine learning now. Lots of papers are getting published that do not contain enough information to reproduce the work and source code is held tight. That's not uncommon is a lot of the sciences. Results are public, but how to get the results are not exactly. I've also been in the engineering and physics fields. Papers there are really not reproducible. They may detail a high level overview of how to do the experiment but they leave out all the "secret sauce". This gives them an edge.

So with the other post that made the front page, just the other day, it detailed how someone got stopped at the border for lying on the visa and that that person was sending pictures and very low level detailed explanations about the lab and its setup. This is essentially the "secret sauce" we're talking about here. If these researchers want to turn their results into a company (say you invent a new drug) you can only do this if you don't tell everyone every detail (which you can't reasonably do in a 10 page journal paper).

This all is especially true for medical work and semiconductor work. The US government is funding many of these labs because they actually want them to do the low level research, make a product, and market it. You can think of it as angel investing (except you don't have to give up shares of the company). But they want it to be a US company that builds and makes the product because that helps the US economy. If the US does the "angel investing" and then the product is created in China by a Chinese company, then that investing was not nearly as useful.

[neltnerb]

The article, probably because it's how the government decided to spin it, is conflating paperwork errors with everything from industrial espionage (i.e. professor tells the company paying them about research done in their lab for another company or paid for by public funds) to actual spying by sharing classified documents.

I am pretty sure it is intentionally vague so that people assume it's worse than it is since they could have just reported the numbers of people they uncovered to be doing something sinister if it fit the narrative.

But I'd lean the exact opposite direction and say that this article has nothing, on its face, to do with hemorrhaging, industrial espionage, or state espionage.

[ethanbond]

There’s a whole lot of science that happens in the area between “published in a public (free/open access?) journal” and “top-secret atomic research.”

The vast majority of research fits between those camps, in fact.

[mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE]

I see, that's probably more of an issue in medical sciences than in fundamental physics where I'm coming from. My experience with "top-secret" research is that it's usually a c r a p.

[godelski]

If we're talking about fundamental physics I'll mention fusion research. If you go to the DOE Chinese citizens are highly restricted around locations like NIF. You don't need any kind of clearance to work at NIF, but people have different restrictions. Same is true for CERN. China doesn't have full access to everything that happens at CERN, which is a fairly open lab.

Most research isn't classified, but that doesn't mean most research is open.