At the beginning of September, ZSI finished its work on the report on EU-China cooperation in STI. The report is part of ReConnect China’s WP1 on science and technology and features a co-publication and co-patent analysis aimed at assessing the volume of cooperation between European and Chinese R&I actors. Due to their high relevance as emerging technologies and being of specific interest both to the EU and China, the study’s focus has been limited to the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data. Regarding the specific list of countries involved in this analysis, we defined “European countries” as the EU’s 27 Member States plus associated countries to Horizon Europe, namely the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland (= EU27/AC). In spite of the fact that only the UK has formally associated to Horizon Europe at the time of finalising this report, we decided to include Norway and Switzerland as well, given their strong role in the whole European R&I system. For both the co-publication and the co-patent analysis we worked with the latest data available from Web of Science from the PATSTAT database respectively (in both cases the period from 2011 to 2022).
Our analysis caters to the needs of a growing European demand to understand China’s involvement in science, technology and innovation cooperation with European actors better. At the same time, the empirical findings discussed in this report may be conducive to national and European R&I policy makers alike, given the on-going debate on how to address research cooperation with China in the future in the light of mounting concerns about security risks, the disregard for research integrity and the misuse of civilian research for military purposes (dual use).