Introduction

In recent decades, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has worked assiduously to increase the competitiveness of its higher education institutions and, interrelatedly, to encourage international academic collaboration. Thanks partly to the Chinese Communist Party government's plans, such as the ‘211 Project’, the ‘985 Project’ and the ‘C9 League’, Chinese universities have become renowned as excellent higher education institutions, particularly in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects. As part of its ambition to achieve international excellence, the PRC government has promoted the ‘internationalization’ of its higher education institutions, which has happened concurrently with the increasing internationalization and marketization of Western higher education institutions (Shattock, 2003; Wolf and Jenkins, 2021).

It is in this context that collaboration between higher education institutions in China and Europe has increased rapidly. Between 2000 and 2022, Chinese and European scientists co-authored over 350,000 scientific papers (Follow The Money, 2022). According to Stoff (2023), within the corpus of science and engineering literature alone, over 43,000 articles that name both PRC-and Germany-based co-authors were published between 2016 and May 2022. Regarding the UK, another study found that 11 per cent of its output of research papers in 2019 was co-authored with individuals from Chinese higher education institutions (Johnson et al, 2021). More broadly, 1,400 cooperation agreements existed between German and Chinese higher education institutions in 2020 (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, 2020), and the country hosts 19 Confucius Institutes (at least four German Confucius Institute partner institutions have either cancelled or put on hold cooperation agreements with their Chinese partners). The UK, on the other hand, hosts 29 Confucius Institutes.