Here’s the problem: Chinese scientists are great scientists, but they work for an authoritarian government where politics, not facts, always comes first.

Early in this century, post-SARS, and in a period when China started allowing more students and scientists to study abroad, collaboration and exchangebetween American and Chinese scientists blossomed.

Many of China’s top scientists today were educated in the West. These include George Gao, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who trained and taught at Oxford and Harvard, and Shi Zhengli, who directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and received her Ph.D. in France.

Many, like Gao, spent more than a decade abroad before returning to China for top jobs and, often, prestigious positions and big salaries. They were great at their bench work, their science was well respected and top American scientists got to know them well. They became friends with their American counterparts, as is clear from Anthony Fauci’s email correspondence with Gao as the pandemic emerged, recently released through a Freedom of Information Act request.