Growing scholarly collaboration between China and Russia could signal a shift in the balance of power in global higher education, according to researchers who suggest that it could have significant implications for academic freedom in the region.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, were present as a cooperation agreement was signed between Beijing’s Tsinghua University and Saint Petersburg State University this month in the Kremlin.

Some academics have suggested that China may be keen to build closer ties with Russian institutions because of U.S. universities’ increasing reluctance to collaborate with Chinese academics amid anxiety about intellectual property theft.

The number of co-authored publications involving Chinese and Russian academics increased by 95.5 percent between 2013 and 2017, according to data from Elsevier’s Scopus database, and the patronage of the two presidents indicated the importance of higher education to ties between the two countries. It was one of a number of agreements signed, in areas including trade and energy, as Xi visited Russia to commemorate the 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the nations.

The agreement between Tsinghua and Saint Petersburg will lead to the creation of a Russian Research Institute at the Beijing university, which will conduct research on Russia-China relations in areas such as industrial development, education, science and technology. Saint Petersburg, which said it now has more than 2,000 Chinese students, also conferred an honorary doctorate on Xi.

Inside Higher Ed