When Pedro Sánchez delivered a speech at the Chinese Academy of Sciences during his April visit to Beijing, he offered a framing that cuts against the prevailing mood in Brussels: that scientific cooperation between countries strengthens rather than weakens both parties. It was a deliberate statement, aimed as much at the EU’s increasingly restrictive science policy as at his Chinese hosts. And it arrived at a moment when the gap between Europe’s stated commitment to open research and its actual policy direction has never been wider.
The Spain-China scientific relationship is one of the most developed bilateral research partnerships in Europe. Spain and China first began working together in science, technology and innovation back in 1985, and the relationship has deepened steadily since. The Action Plan (2025–2028) to Strengthen the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between China and Spain commits both parties to promoting joint degrees, exchanges, and mobility of faculty and students. China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has explicitly listed Spain as one of ten partner countries in its 2026 “Inter-governmental International Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation” Key Special Programme. These are not symbolic commitments — they are funded, institutionalised frameworks producing real research output across biomedicine, renewable energy, agriculture, and advanced materials.
Brussels Pulls in the Opposite Direction
Against this backdrop of deepening bilateral engagement, the EU’s own science policy has moved sharply toward restriction. A new draft of the EU’s €93.5 billion Horizon Europe programme for 2026–27 proposes formally barring Chinese institutions from most research and innovation projects. The ban applies to Clusters 1 (health), 3 (civil security and society), and 4 (digital, industry, and space), and would also apply to EU-based entities “directly or indirectly controlled by Chinese organisations” in sensitive fields such as AI, semiconductors, and quantum technologies.
The strategic logic behind those restrictions is not without merit. One of the biggest issues has been EU concerns that its companies don’t have a level playing field when operating in China — for example, in intellectual property rights, access to government procurement, standards, and conformity assessment. European companies and institutions have very limited access to Chinese R&D and face growing problems in contracting Chinese researchers on the ground — another sign of the imbalance in the relationship. For all the talk of mutual benefit, cooperation that flows predominantly in one direction is not cooperation — it is dependency.
The EU’s approach reflects a broader anxiety about the securitisation of knowledge. Geopolitics is increasingly shaping EU-China scientific collaboration, with new policy proposals suggesting the EU is moving toward excluding Chinese entities from most strategic research areas — reflecting the securitisation of knowledge production amid growing technological rivalry and concerns over dual-use technologies. Europe’s own policy documents stress the need to combine strategic safeguards with scientific engagement — the goal is not decoupling but calibrated de-risking: transparency, due diligence, and selective restriction.
China’s Growing Scientific Weight
The structural challenge for Europe is that China’s scientific capacity has grown dramatically, making disengagement increasingly costly. According to the World Bank, by 2023, China’s R&D expenditure as a share of GDP had surpassed that of Europe and was approaching American levels, with the United States spending about $783 billion on R&D, China $723 billion, and Europe roughly $410 billion. Between 2019 and 2023, Chinese R&D investment grew at an annual rate of 8.9%, compared with 4.7% in the United States.
That trajectory has already produced world-class capabilities in several domains where Europe needs partners rather than rivals. The joint space mission SMILE — Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer — aims to obtain the first global image of the Earth’s magnetosphere, a project that exemplifies the kind of frontier science that neither side can easily replicate alone. Some of the areas with the most potential for cooperation in basic science include astrophysics, biomedicine, oceanography, and supercomputing. In applied research, the China-Spain Action Plan explicitly prioritises technological cooperation in clean technologies, energy storage, advanced manufacturing, agri-food technologies, and health technologies — sectors where both sides have genuine complementary strengths.
The Spain-China quantum computing agreement — aimed at developing Europe’s largest quantum computer with Chinese participation — is the most sensitive example of this dynamic. It illustrates how individual member states are pursuing bilateral scientific partnerships that sit awkwardly alongside EU-level restrictions on Chinese entities in exactly these cutting-edge domains.
A Partnership That Needs Rules, Not Walls
In 2026, Horizon Europe underwent a quiet but significant transformation — one that underscored a fundamental tension between Europe’s ambition for open scientific cooperation and an emergent emphasis on strategic autonomy. That tension will not be resolved by choosing one value over the other. The question is how to build frameworks that are genuinely reciprocal.
The EU and China continue to discuss a Joint Roadmap for future cooperation in science, technology, and innovation — aiming to develop a mutually beneficial research environment based on reciprocity, a level playing field, and respect for fundamental research values. Progress on that roadmap has been slow. Brussels and Beijing remain deadlocked over a mooted joint roadmap that sets down the terms for science and technology cooperation, with intellectual property protections and data access remaining the most stubborn sticking points.
China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) focuses on developing high-quality talent and advancing science and technology — areas where existing collaborations between Chinese and Spanish universities and research institutions lay a strong foundation, creating an ideal platform for expanding future cooperation. Whether that platform expands or contracts will depend less on the ambitions of individual leaders like Sánchez than on whether the EU and China can agree on rules that make cooperation sustainable — and whether European policymakers can resist the temptation to treat every Chinese research relationship as a security threat. The latest Horizon draft pushes the pendulum firmly towards control — the challenge will be to ensure it does not swing so far that cooperation becomes a casualty of geopolitics. Science has always crossed borders more easily than politics. Whether that holds in 2026 is an open and genuinely consequential question.
Original analysis inspired by Global Times Editorial Board from Global Times. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
