Abstract: With China's growing scientific and technological strength, the trade disputes initiated by the US against China reflect more a concern that China's technological progress threatens its technological hegemony in addition to reversing trade, economic and social disadvantages. This is also an important reason for the US to focus its trade sanctions directly on the high-tech sector, targeting industries included in the “Made in China 2025” strategic catalogue such as medical devices, high-speed railway equipment and biological medicine, and the high-tech companies such as Huawei, Tencent and Baidu to manufacture low-end lock-in dilemmas. With regard to the current new situation where the globalization of science and technology is constantly deepening and the flow of innovation factors is increasingly forming a global network, latecomer firms in emerging economies such as China, India and Singapore have specified R&D internationalization as an important strategy, seeking for advanced technologies, creating and maintaining competitive advantages on a global scale through the establishment of overseas R&D institutions and other forms, which has macroscopically contributed to the gradual transfer of innovation resources and achievements to emerging economies. On this basis, this paper focuses on the following question: Is the trade dispute initiated by the US against China hindering the internationalization of R&D by Chinese companies due to its wariness of China's technological progress? What are the influence mechanisms? In-depth answers to these questions are of great significance to the implementation of the “Made in China 2025” strategy and the improvement of manufacturing industry’s competitiveness in a complex international environment. Among the literature on trade disputes affecting micro-firm behaviors, those relevant to this paper is to explore how trade disputes affect firm innovation, but the findings are still controversial. Meanwhile, this paper argues that existing research still has the following shortcomings: firstly, the previous research has focused more on how trade disputes affect firms' domestic innovation, lacking empirical evidence on the internationalization of R&D. Secondly, the existing studies mainly explain how trade disputes affect firms' innovation through export control, without exploring other possible pathways rooted in the Chinese context. Finally, the existing research designs usually ignore the two-way causality and sample selection biases. By summarizing the above research findings and shortcomings, based on the trade dispute initiated by the US against China from 2001-2019, this paper takes China's A-share listed manufacturing companies as the research object to examine the impact of Sino-US trade disputes on the internationalization of Chinese firms' R&D, and constructs the PSM-DID model and 2SLS model in the robustness test to improve the credibility of the findings. The results show that facing trade investigations, Chinese firms will reduce their R&D internationalization activities in the next period, which is caused by export control, import competition and market pressure. Further inspection finds that the above negative influence appears more obviously in companies subject to anti-dumping or countervailing investigations, firms conducting R&D in the United States and developing countries as well as technology-intensive and capital-intensive industries. Based on the findings, this paper proposes the following policy suggestions. Government should formulate countermeasures against trade disputes to mitigate the negative impact of export control, import competition and market pressure on firms' R&D internationalization. Firstly, it is necessary to stabilize existing export shares and expand trade partnerships to mitigate export control shocks; secondly, tariffs on US high-tech products should be levied to mitigate import competition shocks; and finally, it is important to guide local governments to set up special funds for R&D internationalization to mitigate market pressure shocks.