Joint Conference

Promoting Excellence through Enhanced EU-China

Researchers' Mobility and Cooperation

Dear Vice Minister Cao Jianlin, dear Commissioner Carlos Moedas,

Dear Vice-President of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Professor Liu Congqiang,

Dear Vice-Secretary General of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Tan Tieniu,

Dear EU Ambassador to China, Your Excellency Hans-Dietmar Schweisgut,

Distinguished participants and speakers,

I am very pleased to be back again in China and would like to thank you for the opportunity to address you on the occasion of this meeting.

This meeting is taking place during challenging times for the world. The world is now interconnected more than ever with certainly an oversensitivity to short term events. As a scientist, I am more interested in taking the long view, an attitude that Chinese policy makers clearly share. Taking the long view is actually the title of a remarkable movie on the life of the late Chern Shiing Shen, a most inspiring mathematician to whom I personally owe a lot and who has left an impressive legacy in science but also institutionally in China through the Chern Institute at Nankai University.

I have been to China many times since my first visit in 1981. And I have seen many things change, and some radically. But at least one thing has stayed the same. And that is the determination of the Chinese people. You have overcome many challenges in the past. And I have every confidence that you will do so again when needed in the future.

Today, we are celebrating 40 years of EU-China relations. This reminds us that, already then, some visionary people thoughtit was better to work together to solve our problems. We must resist the voices which want to take advantage of every crisis urging us to turn our backs on the rest of the world. The voices which urge us to build walls and barriers between people.

Science especially is a collective, public and international endeavour. New ideas have always spread quite rapidly. And these days discoveries made anywhere are available almost instantly to the global scientific community. Already in 2008, 29% of articles with an EU author had a co-author from outside the European Union. The Chinese Academy of Sciences now produces more scientific articles than any other institution in the world. The top research institutions benchmark themselves at the global level. National policymakers therefore need to maximise the ability of the scientific communities they support to take part in and contribute to this overall enterprise.

That is why,as President of the European Research Council (ERC), a programme of the European Commission, I am delighted that the new cooperation agreement with the National Natural Science Foundation of China could be signed and put in place so quickly. I am grateful to all people who made this achievement possible. This will help young Chinese researchers to come to Europe to join ERC-funded teams, opening the way to further collaborations.

Europe is sometimes seen as an “old continent”. But the ERC was set up only in 2007. This proves that Europe can still innovate and create new, dynamic institutions and make them open to the world.

The ERC is unique at the European level in two ways.

Firstly, it is its independent Scientific Council that has the full responsibility to allocate the annual budget and to organise the scientific evaluation.

Secondly, the ERC has a simple mission: to providesubstantial, long-term funding toresearchers with ambitious ideas to carry out their work while they are based in a European scientific institution or company. Awards are granted solely according to scientific quality with no predetermined priorities, targets or quotas. The level of competition guarantees excellence. Stimulating researchers to explore their own ideas at the frontiers of knowledge is proven to be the best way to generate radical breakthroughs.

In the short time, only 8 years, the ERC has existed it has:

  • Provided around 9 billion Euros in funding to over 5 000 researchers of 66 nationalities hostedmore than 600 host institutions in 32 countries across Europe;
  • Given priority to younger researchers by reserving two-thirds of the overall funding to them;
  • Supported 30 000 researchers and other professionals employed in ERC teams, including nearly 20 000 PhD and post-doc researchers, among which more than 1000 Chinese;
  • Created new knowledge with 40 000 publications from ERC projects in international peer-reviewed journals. Almost 2000 ERC grantees have already published an article that ranks in the top 1% of publications, i.e. with the highest recognition and impact worldwide;
  • Seen many grantees win prestigious prizes after having been awarded an ERC grant: 5 Nobel Prizes, 3 Fields Medals, 5 Wolf Prize and many more. Last month, at the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics held in Beijing, the two major prizes who went to European scientists were awarded to ERC grantees.

And the ERC has been and isopen to researchers from anywhere in the world as ERC grantees are required to spend only 50% of their time in Europe. Dual affiliations are possible. Team members can also be based outside Europe. And additional funding of up to one million euros is available to cover 'start-up' costs for scientists moving to Europe.

Overall, among the over 5 000 ERC-funded researchers, 402 are nationals from outside the European Research Area (2/3 in their early career) coming from 31 countries. They represent 8% of all ERC grantees.

After 16 ERC competitions, the ERC funds 14 researchers from China.So the number of Chinese grant winners is still very small. And the large majority of Chinese applicants and all of the winners were already resident in Europe at the time of their application. So we would like to see more applications from Chinese researchers resident in China.

However, on average each ERC grantee employs six team members. And, at this level, we see a different picture: Nearly 6 000 of the team members are from outside Europe, and of these over 1 000 are Chinese[1]. Furthermore, a large number of these team members came to Europe for the first time to work in an ERC team. One of the aims of the new agreement is to boost these numbers further. This in turn should lead in the future to more ERC granteescollaborating with Chinese colleagues which will then pave the way for them visiting Chinese scientific institutions.

So. If one takes the long view as we should, there are solid reasons to be optimistic. We will hear some great examples of EU-China scientific cooperation after the break. I hope that we will see much more of such cooperation in the future. For this, the only way is to further work together and to continue to push for Open science. So, on the year of celebrating 40 years of China-EU collaboration, let us look forward confidently to 20 more years of EU-China scientific cooperation to reach the critical figure 60, the gate to eternity!

I thank you for your attention.

[1] From a sample of around 2 000 grantees we know that each grantee employs on average 6 team members. Of the total team members around 63% are PhDs and post-docs. And of the total team members around 19% are non-ERA nationals of which 18% are Chinese. Therefore we estimate for PhDs and post-docs the figure for all grantees is 5000 * 6 * 0.63 = 18 900. For Chinese team members the figure for all grantees is 5 000 * 6 = 30000 * 0.19 = 5700 * 0.18 = 1026. For Chinese PhDs and post docs the figure is 1026 * 0.63 = 646.