US remains as a top international research partner with China despite rising trade and tech tensions
- US researchers were the top collaborators with their China counterparts from August last year to this July, according to Nature Index
The US remains a leading collaborator with Chinese research institutions, according to a database, as academic ties remain strong in the face of an ongoing trade war.
US researchers were the top collaborators with their China counterparts from August last year to this July, according to Nature Index, a database of academic papers compiled by international journal publisher Nature Research. The number of joint research articles published by US and Chinese institutions also continued to grow.
In terms of corporate partners, US companies accounted for more than half of collaboration between Chinese researchers and international partners.
IBM topped the chart of international corporate institutions working with Chinese researchers, with 85 jointly-published research papers from 2012 to 2018 in journals tracked by Nature Index. The New York-based tech giant was followed by California-based biopharmaceutical company Amgen with 44 collaborative papers, and Massachusetts biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientific with 37 collaborative articles.
“It is healthy for science and engineering university research to be shared and aimed at benefiting all humanity rather than politicians, and it hurts all sides for politicisation to break this academic tradition,” said De Kai, a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Scientists are beginning to take a stand for this.”
He also pointed out that collaboration between the two countries in the field of AI could be broader than the journal database suggested, as much of the hottest work in AI and related areas appears primarily in conferences rather than journals. “Chinese AI work is actually helping US companies much more than the common narrative suggests,” he stressed.
IBM also had the second biggest number of Chinese corporate research partners with 46 from 2012 to 2018, behind Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Group, which had 63 mainland Chinese partners. Four out of the top five international corporate partners and seven out of top 10 are from the US.