Research collaboration between the UK and China is both increasingly important and increasingly complicated.
China is projected to take over from the USA as the UK’s biggest research collaborator, but the possibility for diplomatic tensions between the two countries to impede academic partnerships is widely remarked. So it’s crucial to have a deeper understanding of how the China-UK collaboration process is experienced by individual researchers from both countries.
In my project for the Centre for Global Higher Education, I interviewed eight researchers (four Chinese and four British) about their experiences in China-UK research collaboration. While all of them work primarily in the field of education, their perceptions showed how the experiences of people on the ground may contrast with the dramatic headlines we constantly see in the media.
