‘Innovation and partnership: the next chapter in the Australia–China education relationship’
Delivered by Universities Australia Chair Professor Carolyn Evans
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Distinguished guests, colleagues and friends.
It’s a great honour to address you today at this momentous event – the 2025 China Annual Conference & Expo for International Education.
On behalf of Universities Australia, thank you to our hosts – the China Education Association for International Exchange – for the opportunity to be part of this important dialogue and to speak alongside so many distinguished speakers.
I’ve had the privilege of leading a delegation of Australian university leaders here to China this week for the inaugural Australia-China University Leaders Dialogue.
During that time, we have been privileged to see some of the extraordinary innovation underway in China driven by industry, university and government.
From the development of next generation medical technologies, to cutting edge genomics, to electric cars that will be part of the fight against climate change, we have witnessed truly impressive, research driven developments.
But we are not just here as witnesses to this flourishing of Chinese innovation, although I know I speak for my colleagues when I say that each of us has learnt a lot from the past few days.
We are here also to partner, as so many Chinese and Australian institutions have over a long period of time.
On this visit, Universities Australia and the China Education Association for International Exchange have signed a renewed memorandum of understanding to guide our cooperation on shared policy objectives and increased engagement.
This signals the start of an exciting new education chapter for our countries as we build on our century-old relationship through education and research.
Innovation and partnership will be at the heart of this next stage.
It is extraordinary to think that the people-to-people elements of this relationship have been in existence for such a long time – 100 years, going back to the 1920s.
That’s how long education has been central to the Australia-China relationship, a partnership twice as old as Australia and China’s formal diplomatic relationship which was only established in 1972.
It was Australia’s then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who in 1972 recognised the importance of engagement and cooperation between our two nations and peoples.
But his desire for Australia and China to come closer together didn’t come from nothing.
It started with education some 50 years earlier with the first Chinese student coming to study in Australia in the mid-1920s.
I think of those early pioneers of international education as they stepped out into a new country with few ways of contacting those at home beyond slow letters.
They must have had a spirit of courage, a willingness to learn, and an understanding that innovation requires us to seek out the new.
They are role models for us all.
Their actions established an early bridge between our countries, helping pave the way for the start of formal diplomatic relations five decades on.
It took longer for Australian students to begin to come regularly to China, but I am so pleased to see more Australian students undertaking study in China now, often supported by the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan.
There were, of course, also Australians who made the journey here many years ago.
I was last in China about a year ago at the invitation of the Beijing Foreign Studies University which was honouring a six-decade long relationship with my colleague Professor Colin Mackerras.
Professor Mackerras has known China for longer than the establishment of diplomatic relations between our countries, first teaching in Beijing in 1964 and returning dozens of times over his long and distinguished career.
Over the past 60 years, he has helped breathe life into the Australia-China relationship, pioneering the study of China in Australia in the fields of Chinese opera, ethnic minorities, modern history and more, and inspiring Chinese scholars to study Australia.
He and his wife opened their home to many Chinese scholars and students who studied in Australia, and they were, in turn, warmly welcomed and helped by colleagues here.
His work has had such a profound impact it has been acknowledged at the highest levels.
Addressing the Australian Parliament in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping praised Professor Mackerras for, in his words, building a bridge of mutual understanding and amity between our peoples.
So, partnerships, whether between individuals or institutions, have been an important element of the relationship between our two countries for decades.
Education has always been one of the most powerful ways in which nations come to understand one another.
In more recent years, the ties created by education have deepened with the addition of research and now innovation and commercialisation.
Both our nations understand that innovation and collaboration are central to addressing the great challenges of our time.
We know that the times in which we live pose extraordinary and critical challenges including climate change, the burden of global diseases, and environmental degradation.
Rapid developments in knowledge and technology also mean that there are exceptional opportunities to improve outcomes for all humankind in areas from health to technological transformation.
The universities of both our countries are critical to responding to the challenges and grasping the opportunities.
Yet we know that we are stronger when we partner to push the boundaries of knowledge.
There are many examples of partnerships between the universities of our two countries which are driving innovative responses to major global challenges.
I can mention only a few but I know my colleagues from the Australian delegation will be happy to share more examples with you.
At the University of Sydney, teams are working with Peking University to improve food systems in Australia and China to ensure they are more sustainable and secure in a changing climate.
Monash University has a joint research institute with Southeast University which involves over 300 staff from the two institutions working in areas like advanced materials, energy, life sciences and smart cities.
They have a strong focus on PhD training, and their projects also involve industry and Chinese government partners.
Flinders University, in collaboration with Nankai University, received the Australia-China Science and Research Joint Research Centre Grant in 2019, and formed the Australia-China Research Centre for Personal Health Technologies.
It is a multidisciplinary centre that integrates research in medicine, chemistry, biotechnology, engineering and digital health.
Griffith University’s Centre for Environment and Population Health is working with a range of Chinese partners to reduce the likelihood and impact of global health crises linked to environmental disasters.
In addition to these traditional areas of innovation, we have seen wonderful partnerships around areas including language, history, culture and philosophy.
Professor MacKerras, for example, has a great love of both Western and Chinese opera and still works at helping these two great musical traditions speak to one another.
It’s in our shared interest to keep going, to build on the great work our researchers are doing together because as we look to the future, innovation will be the currency of progress, but innovation does not emerge in isolation.
Instead, it thrives when universities collaborate with industry, government, communities and across borders.
Our countries, China and Australia, have much to gain by expanding cross-sector partnerships in areas from food security to global health to the transition to net zero.
These are all areas our governments have agreed to expand engagement and collaboration in – sectors that not only align with both our country’s national development priorities but also offer high-value-added, scalable opportunities for joint ventures, research and technology transfer.
To grow our partnership and deepen our engagement further, we must focus on three things.
We must encourage the flow of students between our countries, including short-term exchanges and internships that prepare graduates for global careers and boost our people-to-people links.
PhDs play a particular element here as people who are trained across two systems are often the most adept at sustaining research relationships across those systems.
We must expand joint research, building on successful partnerships with long-term, strategic collaborations in areas that matter most: climate resilience, health, technology and cultural understanding.
Those partnerships may extend beyond university-to-university partnerships to also include industry, hospitals, community organisations and government.
And we must share innovation ecosystems when appropriate, bringing together universities, start-ups and industry across both nations to create shared hubs of creativity and entrepreneurship.
We have learnt so much from the opportunity to see the thriving research ecosystem in the Greater Bay area.
This is all for mutual benefit and our delegation’s visit to China has shown the willingness of both parties to continue to engage and to learn from one another.
Partnerships and innovation will doubtless benefit particular individuals – students who have the chance to learn in a country other than their own, researchers who get to engage with the best peers in other countries and PhDs who have the advantage of supervisors from different systems.
Yet the individual benefit is only the beginning of the story.
Through partnerships we can contribute to stronger relationships between our two countries and through joint innovation we can drive the exciting new products, technologies, methods and analysis that will provide benefits to the global community.
Working together, through partnerships and innovation, we can jointly build a better future for all people.
Thank you.
ENDS
