In 2026, the Japan Science and Technology Agency published an in-depth analysis of the links between innovation policy and scientific diplomacy, offering a rare map of Asian strategies in this domain. The major scientific powers of the region—Japan, China, South Korea, and India—have all engaged in the same fundamental movement: protecting their critical capacities while refusing to sever the channels of international cooperation that made their rise to power possible. This tension between security and openness is now the central nexus of global science policy.

The Essentials

  • Asian states are building an architecture of cooperative sovereignty, protecting sensitive technologies while maintaining open research networks.
  • The JST published in 2026 an analysis of new trends in innovation policy through the lens of science diplomacy (CRDS-FY2025-RR-12).
  • The central mechanism is segmentation: distinguishing shareable knowledge from sensitive knowledge rather than closing down the entire system.
  • The principal risk is archipelagization: if each technological bloc builds its own standards, the diffusion of discoveries slows down and global scientific challenges—climate, pandemics—lose their instruments for collective response.
  • The signals to follow are the evolution of international co-publications and the number of restrictions on exports of emerging technologies.

Japan Maps What No One Wanted to Name

For a decade, the international scientific community preferred to treat geopolitics as an external nuisance to research, not as a structuring variable. The JST publication breaks with this posture. It documents what chancelleries have been practicing for several years without theorizing it: science has become a terrain of strategic competition, and states that refuse to acknowledge this fall behind those that have integrated it.

The JST report analyzes how major Asian scientific nations now coordinate their research policies with their national security and diplomacy objectives. This is no longer an emerging trend: it is an assumed doctrine. Japan, under pressure from its American ally and its own strategic reflection, has revised its legal framework to protect research in so-called “sensitive” domains—semiconductors, quantum computing, synthetic biology, defense AI. South Korea has done the same with its programs protecting intellectual property in battery technologies. India has tightened conditions for foreign researchers’ access to certain public laboratories.

This Asian movement is part of a broader shift that economist Edward Fishman has helped conceptualize: states now use technological capacities as geoeconomic control points, “chokepoints” capable of orienting dependencies and global hierarchies. When the United States restricted access to advanced semiconductors for China starting in 2022, they activated precisely this mechanism. Asian states draw the inverse and symmetrical conclusion: one must build its own control points, or at minimum not leave its own exposed.

China and Japan Play the Same Game with Opposite Strategies

China embodies the most visible version of this securitization. Since the “Made in China 2025” plan and its successors, Beijing has been building technological autonomy in sectors it deems critical, while maintaining a massive international scientific presence. Chinese researchers remain among the most prolific in terms of co-publications in major global scientific journals. The Chinese strategy is therefore less a retreat than a dual presence: participating in open networks to continue learning and exerting influence, while simultaneously developing autonomous capacities sheltered from external restrictions.

Japan chooses a different posture. Its scientific fabric historically rests on strong international openness and partnerships with American and European universities. Japan’s response to technological competition is not autarky, but selectivity. The JST documents how Tokyo seeks to formalize bilateral agreements of scientific trust with like-minded partners—the United States, the European Union, Australia, and India within the Quad framework—while more precisely defining which knowledge can circulate freely and which requires additional guarantees.

This selectivity is more sophisticated than simple export control. It requires a capacity to classify knowledge itself, which is technically and politically difficult: fundamental research in quantum physics can lead to military applications through paths no one anticipates at the time of publication. Japan is investing in institutional frameworks to manage this ambiguity rather than cutting through it brutally in either direction.

South Korea, for its part, navigates in a particularly delicate middle ground. Security alliance with Washington, deep economic interdependence with Beijing, and its own technological ambitions in semiconductors and hydrogen means Seoul must navigate three simultaneous logics. Its approach to scientific diplomacy resembles permanent management of tensions rather than a clear doctrine. It is uncomfortable, but it honestly reflects the complexity of a geographic and economic position without equivalent.

Open Science and Sovereignty Lack Common Institutional Tools

The Asian securitization movement reveals an institutional gap that the international scientific community has not yet filled. The norms of open science—data sharing, access to publications, researcher mobility—were built in a world where geopolitical competition was supposed to remain outside laboratories. That world no longer exists.

UNESCO has documented progress in open science in East Asia, notably the adoption by Japan, South Korea, and China of open access policies for publicly funded publications. These advances are real. They coexist with inverse movements: access restrictions, enhanced security checks for foreign researchers, lists of technologies whose transfer requires prior authorization.

This contradictory coexistence stems from the absence of an international framework that would systematically distinguish what can be shared from what cannot. Each state manages the line its own way, with its own criteria, its own lists, its own procedures. The result is growing uncertainty for researchers working in international networks: they do not always know precisely which data they can share, with whom, and in what framework. This uncertainty carries a real cost for scientific productivity.

Philippe Aghion, whose work on Schumpeterian growth highlights the importance of open innovation dynamics, offers a useful counterpoint to the logic of chokepoints. In his reading, long-term growth rests on the diffusion of knowledge and the capacity of multiple actors to seize upon it to innovate. Closing scientific networks in the name of security would carry a measurable economic cost, not only a political one: slowing the diffusion of fundamental knowledge means slowing the foundation on which applied innovation is built. The tension between Fishman and Aghion is not resolved by current data; it is precisely the tension that Asian states are trying to manage without cutting through it.

We find an analogous dynamic in other sectors where infrastructure precedes usage capacity: as debates on AI and digital infrastructures show, countries that control the physical layers and technical standards retain a durable advantage over those who access them only as users.

Current Limitations of Co-Publications as an Indicator

Statistics on international co-publications remain one of the best available indicators of the state of scientific networks. They are imperfect, capturing neither the quality of collaborations nor the nature of knowledge exchanged, but they provide a useful trend image.

These indicators show signals of growing fragmentation in certain key domains like semiconductors and AI, even though fragmentation is not yet generalized across all scientific networks. Recent bibliometric studies document a notable sectoral transition: the share of China-USA co-publications in global totals declined between 2019 and 2021, and the trend has continued. Asian researchers nevertheless continue to co-publish with American and European teams in many fields, and China remains deeply integrated into global scientific circuits. Restrictions in force concern primarily technological applications and transfers of industrial property, less so published fundamental research.

These aggregates can, however, mask deeper sectoral developments. In certain domains—defense AI, synthetic biology, materials for advanced semiconductors—researchers report growing difficulties conducting transnational collaborations, longer approval processes, partners declining projects out of caution. These weak signals typically precede visible statistical ruptures by several years.

South Africa’s experience with quantum technologies illustrates what fragmentation of networks costs countries that have not yet built their own capacities: when technological centers of gravity retreat into trust blocs, peripheral nations lose access to the networks that would allow them to catch up. The technological sovereignty of major Asian powers is sometimes built at the expense of global scientific inclusion.

Two Possible Trajectories Through 2045, and What Distinguishes Them

The JST does not formulate a prediction, but its analysis delimits the space of possible trajectories fairly clearly. Two scenarios structure the debate.

In the first, Asian states manage to institutionalize cooperative sovereignty: bilateral and regional agreements define zones of scientific trust, shared standards enable identification of freely circulating knowledge, and global challenges—climate change, pandemics, biodiversity—serve as neutral terrain on which broad cooperation remains possible even among rivals. This scenario requires considerable institutional investments: verification mechanisms, arbitration over definitions of “sensitivity,” specialized diplomatic forums. It is not impossible, but it requires political will that current tensions make difficult to mobilize.

In the second, securitization spirals. Each restriction triggers a retaliation. Each technological bloc builds its own standards, its own validation circuits, its own researcher networks. Global science fragments into relatively sealed archipelagos, and discovery diffusion slows significantly. Climate technologies developed in one bloc remain difficult to deploy in another due to lack of interoperability. The least developed countries lose access to networks that would allow them to catch up. This scenario is not a sudden rupture: it is a progressive accumulation of frictions that, over a decade, constitute a structural obstacle.

What will allow these trajectories to be distinguished in coming years is less the rhetoric of states than concrete signals: the curve of international co-publications in sensitive domains, the number and scope of export restrictions on emerging technologies, and above all the capacity of existing or new multilateral forums to produce standards accepted by the principal scientific powers. If regional open science agreements consolidate around climate and health issues, it signals favor for the first scenario. If export control lists continue to lengthen without institutional counterweight, it signals disfavor.

The European Union occupies a pivotal position in this dynamic. A privileged partner of Japan and South Korea, an indispensable interlocutor of India, it possesses leverage to promote scientific sharing standards that are neither the naiveté of total openness nor the reflex of complete lockdown. Its experience in regulation, including digital, as illustrated by its work on technological sovereignty, could nourish a model applicable to international scientific cooperation.

Japan’s Advantage in Formalizing Science Diplomacy

The merit of the JST publication is naming a diplomatic work that many states conduct implicitly. Science diplomacy—using research cooperation to build relations of trust between states—is an ancient practice. What is new is its explicit articulation with objectives of national security and technological competitiveness.

Japan formalizes this articulation. It does not seek to choose between openness and protection: it seeks to design institutions that make the two compatible. It is a difficult wager, and its outcome is not guaranteed. But the method—mapping practices, identifying tensions, proposing frameworks—is precisely what international debate needs to prevent tactical state responses from producing a strategic collapse of global scientific networks.

The question that remains open is that of institutional resources available for this work. Existing multilateral organizations were not designed to arbitrate tensions between open science and national security. The OECD, UNESCO, and the WTO have partial instruments, but no forum is currently able to produce binding standards on sharing sensitive knowledge. Filling this void, if the great powers desire it, is the decisive institutional undertaking of the next cycle.

Sources

  1. Japan Science and Technology Agency, New Trends in Science and Technology Innovation Policy from the Perspective of Science Diplomacy (CRDS-FY2025-RR-12), 2026, https://www.jst.go.jp/crds/en/publications/CRDS-FY2025-RR-12_EN.html
  2. UNESCO, Open Science Outlook 1: Setting the Scene for Action, https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/outlook
  3. Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, Penguin Press, 2023
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  8. MOFA Japan, Science and Technology Diplomacy, https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/s_tech/index.html
  9. NSF NCSES, Science & Engineering Indicators 2024, https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202333/assets/nsb202333.pdf
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  12. DFAT Australia, The Quad, https://www.dfat.gov.au/international-relations/regional-architecture/quad
  13. NISTEP, Digest of Japanese Science and Technology Indicators 2024, https://www.nistep.go.jp/en/wp-content/uploads/NISTEP-RM341-SummaryE.pdf