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US-China relations
ChinaScience

Scientists in China ‘struggle to get instruments because of US export controls’

  • By December, the number of trade items on the US control list had grown to over 4,500 – including nearly 1,900 scientific instruments
  • None of the top 20 instrument makers in the world are Chinese, but Beijing encourages labs to use home-grown tech for the nation to be more self-reliant

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None of the world’s top 20 scientific instrument makers are in China, and as the US adds instruments to its commercial export control list, Chinese scientists and laboratories are finding it increasingly difficult to buy the tools they need, says a new study. Photo: AFP
Stephen Chen
Scientific instruments, mostly analytical or measuring devices for use in a laboratory, made up more than 40 per cent of the items restricted for sale to China after being put on the US commercial export control list, according to analysis by Chinese researchers and artificial intelligence.
After the trade war between China and the United States started in 2018, Chinese scientists said they found it increasingly difficult to buy research tools from the US. While researchers from different fields were making the same complaint, it was not known how problematic the overall situation had become for scientists in China.

By December last year, the number of trade items on the US control list had grown to over 4,500. Many of the names were technical, recognised only by experts in specialised fields, and none were officially classified as scientific instruments.

An AI system was trained on a database of detailed information about most hardware used in laboratories across China and found that nearly 1,900 items (42 per cent) on the US list were scientific instruments.

In the past, China’s access to certain instruments was restricted because they could be used in military research. But after the trade war began, China’s fundamental research and advanced manufacturing sectors became the main targets of the US export control policies, according to the researchers.

The US government “tried to restrict China’s access to some emerging and foundational technologies to contain China’s development in scientific research and industrial manufacturing”, said professor Wang Xuezhao and her colleagues at the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a paper published in the domestic peer-reviewed journal World Sci-Tech R&D on August 25.

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