Challenges on the European Union-China cooperation in higher education from ‘people-to-people dialogue’ perspective: The case of health-related joint projects

The European Union (EU) and People’s Republic of China have a tradition of cooperation in Higher Education (HE) that has been increasingly developed since the Chinese reform of economic opening. From 2012 onwards, when the EU-China High-Level People-to-people Dialogue was established as the third pillar of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between both parties, this cooperation in HE was enhanced, particularly in terms of people mobility (students, teachers and researchers). Along with this, globalization and the need for global governance responses in terms of global issues like climate changes, water and food security, pandemics and other health issues lead us to reflect about the role of academic and scientific cooperation - in the domain of HE and research cooperation-in the lens of this People-to-People approach. By means of a literature review grounded on different sources of documents (scientific articles; policy briefs; joint statements and educational programs) and their content analysis, the aim of this paper is to trace a brief state-of-the-art of the EU-China relations in the field of HE and research to analyze if there are effective EU-China partnerships in HE as a whole, and in health scientific joint research projects in particular, by mapping health-related projects involving the EU’s and PRC’s academic and research institutions, as well as their goals.