Europe, China and the future of open borders in science

Iceland's Halldór Harðarson on his decade working on science cooperation in Beijing

While relations between the United States and China have reached a detente in the past week after APEC, it’s the long-term decline of relations between the European Union and China that is worth a deeper look. Over the past two decades, Europe and China cooperated across science, technology and economic development, helping fuel China’s vast labs and manufacturing base that today is at the center of the West’s fears for its primacy in the world. Everything has changed, and so what can we learn from the past?

For more than a decade, Halldór Berg Harðarson lived and worked in China as part of EURAXESS, an initiative of the European Union to connect European and Chinese scientists together to accelerate frontier research. From the heady and optimistic early 2010s to the serious challenges of Covid-19, Hardarson saw it all live from Beijing — a far cry from his home fishing village in Iceland. Today, he works at a biotech unicorn in Iceland called Kerecis, which uses fish skin for tissue regeneration.

Alongside me and Riskgaming scenario consultant Ian Curtiss, we talk about what Iceland can learn from China and vice versa despite the massive population gap, the transformation in the European Union’s relationship with China, and we throw in some optimistic notes at the end for a nice aftertaste.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For the full interview, please subscribe to our podcast.

Danny Crichton:

You two are both long-term China hands. You met in 2011, I believe. How did you meet? What was the environment like back then?

Ian Curtiss:

One of my first memories of Halldór is, I think it was in Pan Wei’s class and we were debating human rights and individual liberties and how the state serves individual liberties in different ways. Halldór tells the professor something, and the professor responds with, “Your country has 300,000 people. That is the population of one district in Beijing. I’m not going to listen to you.” I remember just everybody in the room was like, oh, whoa, this is a different perspective.

Halldór Harðarson:

I enjoyed those classes quite a bit, actually. It’s very uncommon to get the chance to debate someone with such a different frame of reference for almost everything. Really, really deep thinker, but almost everything, all the assumptions, were very different from anything I would ever assume about the world.

It was a totally different world back then. People seemed a lot more optimistic about China. It was almost a given that there was a transition happening, things were slowly developing for the better. When it came to the leadership transition that was around the corner, people assumed it would be a peaceful thing.

Ian Curtiss:

I remember in our classes, one of the professors was referencing local county-level elections as an example of progress and change in China and the building momentum toward democracy. It was very much a discussion at that point.

I joined the American Chamber of Commerce after our degree, though, and it was fascinating watching how dramatically the tone shifted from 2013 on. I’m curious to hear your take, Halldór, from the EU perspective, but when I started, it was overwhelmingly, keep the engines going, everybody’s making money, everybody’s really happy. But when I left, it was the business community that confronted the Obama administration. If anyone remembers the U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty that was being negotiated, it was the business community that confronted the U.S. Trade Representative and said, “Actually, I don’t know if this is a good thing because so much weird stuff happens once firms enter the market.”

Halldór Harðarson:

Right after university, I started working on projects for the European Union. I ended up leading one for more than a decade. It was on innovation, research, and science. I remember really distinctly in 2015, at the early Horizon 2020 research framework program from the European Union, we had our Director-General of research and innovation coming to China. He comes and we have this big event sort of welcoming China into the research framework program. The main slogan of Horizon 2020 was, “Open to the world,” and the idea back in those days was that it would be a great benefit for the whole global system of science to include China, which arguably still is.

But it was undoubtable in those days that Chinese science was not very significant. It was growing, but there were not a lot of significant contributions yet. They were spending only a fraction of what Europe and the United States were spending on science. They were also not getting super good results.

The whole idea was to reach out, in what we then assumed would be a non-competitive arena, like basic science, to sort of build up the basic knowledge for the good of all humanity. Some of the biggest challenges on the planet were in China, and you were not going to solve things like climate change without working with the Chinese. That was the tone in 2015.

Danny Crichton:

Coming from Iceland, a country of 300,000, into a country of 1.3 billion, how was that transition for you? I feel like you’re a unique entity here, because you stayed all the way through 2024 — through Zero-COVID and all kinds of different dynamics. How was that experience? Was this a burning building but it’s slow and you sort of realized like, oh, the smoke is getting into more rooms, but it’s okay in this one?

Halldór Harðarson:

COVID was definitely a canary in the coal mine. The experience really revealed the true colors of the system, for better and for worse. When the Chinese want to stand together to do a certain thing, they have an extremely effective culture for doing so. They have institutions within their political system that can be activated at a moment’s notice to mobilize huge initiatives.

I know people in the West were really relatively unhappy with their governments, but in China, it went way beyond anything you could imagine. There were a couple of times where I woke up and my door was locked from the outside because I had been quarantined without being told what was going on. I was just locked in my apartment.

But because of my topic of expertise, the experience was also super revealing. One of the things I’d been working on was this network of European researchers in China. The idea was to support researchers’ mobility. So, researchers are coming to China and Chinese researchers are coming to Europe and so on. But COVID was a bit of a slap in the face.

Just before the closures, I had just finished doing a big survey on all of my researchers, so I had this really lovely dataset about the community. Then in March 2020, we found out like 75% of the European scientists in China were locked out of China. This is clearly bad for China, you would think. China’s trying to attract these researchers, right? It took decades to build up the institutions to attract these researchers.

I did another survey in August that year. I was like, okay, now COVID is over. It wasn’t, but I was also wondering, is this all about COVID? What’s going on here? In the end, I surveyed the researchers again in 2022, 2023, and this year. My main hypothesis now is that COVID accelerated a development that was already happening behind the scenes. When China finally opened again in 2023, there were fewer than half of the European researchers there used to be. This year, I also found that there’s been no renewal.

So, what happened? If you ask the European scientists in China, they would say COVID happened. I don’t know about you guys, but COVID is ancient history by now and people not coming has very little to do with what happened four or five years ago. There’s something else going on, and that’s really remarkable in my opinion.

Danny Crichton:

It really does feel like the world has changed. There was this idea that there’s sort of a flat scientific community with no walls and no barriers, that all the data can flow all around the world. Now we seem to have moved on to a world of walls and barriers and borders. How are you seeing it from the European Union perspective? How do you see the EU balancing between the two sides?

Halldór Harðarson:

The liberal world order goes really deep in the DNA of the European Union, but that has been changing.

I don’t think China is the main reason, though. The big thing that happened was the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And that really is changing European attitudes toward what it means to be European and a European Union.

But even before that, and even in my job working with China on science and innovation policy, attitudes were already getting cynical. One big thing was that we should probably not be working with them on things where we are directly competing. 5G was the big thing back then. It was hard because some countries were having really useful collaborations and other countries were very much against it.

There were also countries saying, “China is becoming really good at certain things. We should maybe stop having this colonial attitude where we are over here handing over infrastructure and helping them out or whatever, and maybe it is better to think about them more like a peer. We can teach you certain things, but what can we learn from you? What are things we can take out of this relationship?” That was really new.

And then down the line, especially after 2022, the attitude started to really, really center on the idea of risk. That’s the word Europeans love to use. The Americans used the word decoupling, and the Europeans talked about de-risking, which indicates that you still want to work together but you want to be responsible about it.

The practical effect was that in Horizon Europe, which is the framework program after Horizon 2020, we basically weren’t targeting Chinese participation in any area anymore, except for in agriculture (mostly biology) and climate change. I believe they are still working on those.

Ian Curtiss:

This is such a great case study, returning to the civilizational discussions of our degree. It’s a great case study of realism versus liberalism, and liberalism can only exist in a system where the rules are completely clear and enforced equally. Only then can everybody agree to get along.

But when you think about the Chinese perspective, what they would always say to us was, “Well, the liberal world order is just industrial policy as written by the United States government,” meaning open borders allow the better U.S. products to get into everybody’s economies. Also meaning that IP protection is really just the wealthy country’s way to keep their advantages.

COVID was such a critical moment that opened people’s eyes, changed their perspectives — however you want to describe it. They realized that maybe politics is involved in so much more than we thought.

Halldór Harðarson:

Yeah. I could go very philosophical on this. A concept that really helps for me is that you have traditional land powers and you have mercantile naval powers. And so you have the British Empire and then the American world order on and so on. And these powers, they thrive on trade. But countries like China and Russia, they don’t feel safe relying on that alone. I’m also from a small island with a huge moat where we have extremely high GDP purely from trade. And so we think, why don’t we all get along and just do that?

I’m really, really sad about how things are going these days. I feel like we were really heading toward a cliff at the beginning of the 20th century with the two world wars. The international order was extremely precarious, and we were not really sure how to go about fixing things. In the end, we ended up with very wise people, who had experienced a lot of things, building institutions that worked out really well. They definitely worked out for the United States and the West. But they also worked out really well for China. When they decided to be open to the system, it worked really, really well for them. So, it’s sad when people start tearing that down.

The big hesitation I have toward China is that their system is almost designed to tear down these institutions, no matter what they’re saying. That being said, the U.S. administration is also not doing its best to keep those institutions alive and maintain them. I have regrets on both sides of that aisle here.

Danny Crichton:

Look, a lot of institutions are buckling. Many were made in the post-war era, and a generation of the people who built those institutions — maintained them for a long time — are passing away.

Today, you look at the United Nations, and just in the last couple of weeks because of UNGA, there’s a spate of articles that the UN has never been in a worse position on its 80th anniversary. Its budget is a mess partly because of U.S. underfunding. But it also feels like it’s an institution that just isn’t reflective of the world today.

I think we’re seeing that kind of pressure across the board, and it comes from two places. In some cases, the institutions are out of sync. I wouldn’t say out of date, but out of sync. Power has shifted economically, militarily, whatever the case may be, and so they’re just not reflective of the new balance of power. And then in other cases, I think there is a new generation of folks who are coming up who just don’t have experience with World War I, World War II, or the Cultural Revolution.

I don’t know if that changes. The war between Russia and Ukraine, the war with Israel, tensions over Taiwan, the Philippines and China. Are these experiences going to create a new generation of folks who say, “God, we’re doing it all over again. We’re getting closer to the brink and we won’t get as lucky as we did last time.” My hope is we will learn from experience — from close calls — and we won’t go all the way over the cliff.

Ian Curtiss:

To tie this back to really current events, there are all these ongoing negotiations and big promises that administrations keep making to their constituents. My prediction is that a lot of people are going to walk away disappointed because there are things going on in the world that, to your point, no single administration can change. The American president might be the most powerful person on the planet, but they’re still only representing 350 million-ish people out of eight billion. In terms of global economic growth, we’re just not the most powerful engine, relatively speaking. The lever just isn’t there, there’s just not the ability to control outcomes like American constituents expect.

So, dealing with China and dealing with issues like tech controls, export controls, and the future of U.S.-Chinese competition and so forth, I think one thing that’s going to be really interesting is people understanding that we can’t win everything anymore. So therefore, maybe we do want more global systems to limit the outcomes when somebody else wins. That’s the traditional game theory approach to political systems: you want to mitigate the downsides. For a long time, I think the Americans have had less downside risk, and as a result, there’s a lack of appreciation for the system that existed.

Danny Crichton:

Look, I mean, the other part of game theory is when you have two superpowers, everyone else is in the middle. I mean, just yesterday as we’re recording this, Canada is saying it might allow Chinese electric vehicles into the Canadian market, which would be the first time Chinese cars come through North America. I think we’re starting to see that in the European Union as well, where they’re looking at these anti-coercion measures.

But let’s end on a positive note. You started in China back in 2011. It was a pretty optimistic, positive time. That feels like distant history. What are we happy for? Ian, you just hit a huge success milestone outside of your Riskgaming work here.

Ian Curtiss:

Yeah, thanks, Danny. So part of a passion project of mine is getting some B2C games out there in the spirit of getting people to simulate and experience systems outside of the ones they’re used to. And so, we just got a board game funded on Kickstarter. It’s called Iberia: Kings and Emirs, and it is all about Medieval Spain and the complexities of religious identities at that time. So, it is a good, light topic, but the game really shows how politics is always so nuanced on the ground and the stories we tell about historical periods often don’t reflect the human experience of what actually happened at the time. So, it ends up being quite a lighthearted experience.

Danny Crichton:

Well, congratulations. And Halldór, you’ve switched over. So you had this extraordinarily long career in China, but now you work at one of Iceland’s most successful startups. What are you working on today?

Halldór Harðarson:

Yeah, I work for a company that is doing tissue regeneration and tissue repair in the medical field, it’s called Kerecis. It’s really, really cool, and people should look into it. I think my work there goes to one of my fundamental beliefs about the world. Ever since I was very young, I just really, really thought technology would save us all.

I grew up in a small fishing village here in Iceland. I would’ve never thought that the most valuable part of the fish we catch would not be the fish itself, the meat of it, but the skin. The company I work for takes that skin and uses it to regenerate tissue, and it sells it for thousands and thousands of dollars, these little pieces. We’re now entering an era where incredible things are going to be possible — amazing things.

So, what I want to leave this conversation with is this: We talk about collaborating with China in science and research, or not collaborating with them. But I guess what we should ask ourselves is, can we put a little more responsibility on them? Ask them, “If you want to collaborate with us on the future, on building this future, could you please contribute here?”

Instead of talking about tit-for-tat and all of that, if we are serious about the global challenges we want to tackle together, we should not be afraid to ask a lot of each other. And if people are not able to contribute as much as they take, then we need to be a little bit selfish while we rebalance.

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