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Four years into a flat cash budget cycle, how do you increase the resources available for UK research? One answer is to look overseas, to the more dynamic economies of Asia and Latin America, where investment in science and innovation is growing fast. And nowhere more so than China, where research budgets have increased by more than 10% year-on-year since the mid-1990s, exceeding one trillion renminbi (£100bn) for the first time in 2012.
Little surprise then, that the government sees science as one arena where the UK and China can do business. Since October 2013, David Willetts, minister for universities and science, has made three trips to China (one with the chancellor, one with the prime minister and one on his own) to thrash out the details of an ambitious new programme of collaborative research.
The broad contours of the Newton Fund were unveiled in April, with a commitment of £375m over five years, to be spent on joint projects.
These will be cofinanced by the UK – from the budget of the Department for International Development (DfiD) – and a targeted group of fifteen emerging powers: Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam.
China will account for the largest slice, when last week it signed an agreement for a UK-China research partnership worth £53m to help fund projects on climate change, energy and human diseases.
A significant shift
Asking emerging economies to match the UK's investment, as equal partners, is a significant shift from the traditional model of science and technology capacity-building as part of overseas aid, even if the UK's share is coming from DfID.
But persuading the Chinese to buy into this hasn't been easy: at a Foundation for Science and Technology dinner last week, Willetts joked that getting the funds from Beijing "was like excavating concrete with nail scissors".
Now that the funding is in place, the next challenge comes in determining how best to align UK and Chinese strengths, weaknesses and priorities across the research and innovation value chain. This process needs to take account of risks as well as opportunities, given persistent concerns over intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer and cybersecurity.
How to design and manage this process of targeted collaboration is the focus of China's Absorptive State, a report I co-authored last year for Nesta – a charity that invests in innovative projects.
The report reviews developments across China's research system, and identifies ways in which UK-China collaboration can become more strategic. It includes fresh bibliometric analysis, and shows that the UK has, for the first time, overtaken Japan as the second most frequent source of co-authored academic papers with China (behind only the US).
However, this collaborative map is uneven: in certain fields, such as engineering and computer science, about 8% of the UK's research base is now involved in some kind of collaboration with China. But in others, including the social sciences, there is still huge potential for more UK-China partnerships.
Scope for collaboration in social sciences
Links across the science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines understandably attract most of the attention in any discussion of UK-China collaboration – particularly as so much of China's own funding is concentrated on science and engineering.
But given the UK's enormous strengths across the social sciences, and China's comparative weakness, the scope for productive collaboration is clear. There are a number of areas, including sustainable cities, public health and low-carbon innovation, where the UK can offer China unique interdisciplinary strengths, which span the natural and social sciences.
The Newton Fund should provide the mechanism for these opportunities to be realised. My advice to smart UK researchers is brush up your Mandarin and get ready to spend a lot more time in Beijing and Shanghai.
James Wilsdon is professor of science and democracy at the University of Sussex and chair of the Campaign for Social Science. He is co-author of China's Absorptive State: research, innovation and the prospects for China-UK collaboration. Follow him on Twitter @jameswilsdon.
• This article was amended on 27 June to correct a conversion error from £0.9bn to £100bn.
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