Europe, China and the future of open borders in science

While relations between the United States and China have reached a detente in the past week after APEC, it’s the long-term decline of relations between the European Union and China that is worth a deeper look. Over the past two decades, Europe and China cooperated across science, technology and economic development, helping fuel China’s vast labs and manufacturing base that today is at the center of the West’s fears for its primacy in the world. Everything has changed, and so what can we learn from the past?For more than a decade, Halldor Hardarson lived and worked in China as part of EURAXESS, an initiative of the European Union to connect European and Chinese scientists together to accelerate frontier research. From the heady and optimistic early 2010s to the serious challenges of Covid-19, Hardarson saw it all live from Beijing — a far cry from his home fishing village in Iceland. Today, he works at a biotech unicorn in Iceland called Kerecis, which uses fish skin for tissue regeneration.With host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming scenario consultant Ian Curtiss, the trio talk about what Iceland can learn from China and vice versa despite the massive population gap, the transformation in the European Union’s relationship with China, and we throw in some optimistic notes at the end for a nice aftertaste.