much higher than their investments in China. Though China’s investments in the
EU grew rapidly, such investments only amounted to 0.7 billion EUR in 2010 and
soared to 3.2 billion EUR^32 in 2011, they were still negligible compared with the
EU-US investment relations. Mutual investments have closely linked European and
American enterprises and societies and serve as the foundation forfirm social and
political relations between them.
In the case of scientific and technological cooperation, in recent years, China and
the EU have signed a series of intergovernmental scientific and technological
cooperation agreements and have established the China-EU Steering Committee for
Scientific & Technological Cooperation. In 2005, the two sides issued a joint
declaration concerning China-EU scientific and technological cooperation, they
determined the“Year of China-EU Scientific and Technological Cooperation”
(2006–2007) and signed theChina-EU Scientific and Technological Partnership
Initiative(2009), which demonstrated vigorous China-EU scientific and techno-
logical cooperation. However, the EU and the USA have furthered scientific and
technological cooperation characterized by more projects, a wider scope and a
higher level; especially, both sides have engaged in very close cooperation in such
fields as space technology, atomic energy, cyber security, epidemic prevention and
treatment, etc.; scientific research and technological cooperation on a nongovern-
mental basis and in academic circles between the two sides take place at all times.
With respect to cooperation on original research papers, though international
cooperation in the frontierfields of science and technology is very robust and
Chinese scholars in the EU and in the USA have also extensively participated in
various kinds of scientific research,final achievements—scientific papers jointly
published by European and American scientists greatly outnumber those resulting
from the cooperation among Chinese and European scientists. Thus, scientific and
academic contacts between the EU and the USA are more extensive and deeper than
the scientific and academic cooperation between China and the EU.
On the whole, the EU and the USA not only are still connected by a traditional
strategic bond of cooperation, but long ago they also entered into an interdepen-
dence relationship on a much higher level than that between China and the EU,
thanks to their far-ranging exchanges and cooperation in suchfields as the econ-
omy, science and technology, society, politics, etc. Scientific and academic coop-
eration between the EU and the USA, except for a fewfields, is seldom subject to
restrictions from national boundaries; cooperation among various social sectors on
both sides has been carried out by determining the construction of a“transatlantic
common market”as thefinal direction and is developing in the direction of more
coordination and more unification. Though both the China-EU Strategic Partnership
and the Transatlantic Strategic Partnership are named“Strategic Partnership”, there
are great qualitative and quantitative differences between them, from strategic
positioning to mechanism construction especially, EU-US cooperation is
(^32) Eurostat news release,“EU27 Investment Flows with the Rest of the World Recovered in 2011,”
88/2012, 13 June 2012.
1 An Overview of the China-EU Strategic Partnership (2003–2013) 23