The Chinese Vector of EU Cooperation in Science and Technology: Adjusting the Strategy

An integral part of the modern international science and technology policy of the EU has become a radical reformatting of cooperation with China in order to defend European interests and assert strategic autonomy in the field of science, technology and innovation. In recent years, the EU has been striving to combine, on the one hand, the support and development of a joint open research environment, within which the effectiveness of solving global and national problems is increasing, and, on the other hand, the need to ensure national and regional interests. The purpose of the article is to identify directions and instruments, as well as problematic aspects of the EU policy to recalibrate scientific and technological ties with China. The study highlights the systematization of problems that have accumulated in European-Chinese scientific and technological cooperation, as well as the identification of a range of instruments that contain measures aimed at solving them. The author demonstrates the EU’s achievement of strategic maturity in building new scientific and technological ties with China in the context of increasing tension in bilateral relations. As part of the distance, which is relative in nature, the EU is pursuing a policy of securitisation of scientific and technological ties through the prism of “challenge-response”. The significance of the study lies in the substantiation that the recalibration policy is multi-level in nature and involves a flexible and pragmatic EU-wide approach by all stakeholders in the form of establishing a balance between research safety and academic freedom.

science diplomacy, open science, European Union, scientific and technological cooperation, China, freedom of scientific research, strategic autonomy