Sweden’s first academic exchanges with China took place in 1918, with the inaugural engagement with the People’s Republic of China following in 1952. Modern-era academic interactions expanded in the mid-2000s, fueled by bilateral agreements on science, technology, and higher education. However, Sweden’s academic links began to slow in the late 2010s, reflecting heightened diplomatic tensions and growing public scrutiny of engagements with Chinese institutions.
This report examines links to China among 29 public universities and three private or non-profit higher education institutions (HEIs). Of these, 25 institutions have at least one current connection—direct or indirect, including through consortia or multi-institutional agreements—to Chinese partners. Across these institutions, these links amount to 159 agreements or memoranda of understanding.
Transparency
As public authorities, Sweden’s public universities are subject to the principle of public access, meaning that agreements and related documents are generally available to the public. Under the 1949 Freedom of the Press Act, all documents submitted to, produced by, or stored by a public authority are, in principle, public, thus granting everyone the right to access them and, for a fee, obtain copies.
During our investigation, we found that most contracts provided were institution- or faculty-level agreements or memoranda of understanding, offering limited insight into specific research areas. Only two respondents supplied detailed breakdowns of research fields.
While all public universities responded to the request, several noted that the administrative workload of compiling agreements was considerable, resulting in partial submissions. In other cases, respondents provided only a subset of the requested documents without clearly explaining omissions or sent large collections of files with little contextual information about their contents.
For at least 25 links, the material consisted of older agreements that had technically expired but were subsequently renewed, creating ambiguity regarding later versions or amendments.
Confucius Institutes
Sweden was the first EU country to open a Confucius Institute (CI) in 2005, and the first to fully close all CI-related activity in 2020. At their peak in the early to mid-2010s, Sweden hosted four CIs and one Confucius Classroom, embedded at universities and an upper secondary school.
These programs were phased out between 2015 and 2020 through non-renewal of agreements. Key factors included escalating bilateral tensions following the 2015 abduction of Swedish-Chinese publisher Gui Minhai, as well as increased public scrutiny of Hanban financing and its influence over curricula on cultural, historical, and social topics.
Sweden’s early adoption and subsequent closure of CIs, together with ongoing debates about safeguarding academic freedom, have heightened public awareness of the potential risks of such partnerships. These experiences have also informed Sweden’s proactive approach to research security at the European level.
Sweden’s evolving research security policy
Sweden began working toward a more centralized and coordinated system for responsible internationalization in 2018, when the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) identified gaps in contextual knowledge and risk assessment in project applications.
Between 2019 and 2020, STINT, in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Lund University, produced guidelines for HEIs covering security, ethics, academic freedom, and intellectual property rights. These guidelines laid the foundation for subsequent efforts by Sweden’s regulatory agencies to formalize regulations.
During its EU Council Presidency in 2023, the Swedish government elevated the concept of “responsible internationalization” to the EU policy agenda and welcomed the European Commission’s January 2024 recommendation on managing risks in research collaborations.
In parallel, the government tasked Sweden’s three academic oversight agencies with developing responsible internationalization frameworks. This work included pilot projects at HEIs between 2024 and 2025, resulting in two reports proposing unified national guidelines and a new framework for responsible internationalization in higher education, research, and innovation.
The final report identified five overarching needs in international academic collaborations: coordinated risk assessment processes between universities and agencies; development and updating of policy frameworks to guide engagement with foreign partners, particularly in authoritarian states; strengthened institutional capacity and expertise to evaluate and manage risks; more integrated support systems across higher education and research institutions; and enhanced dialogue and coordination between academic institutions, government agencies, and security authorities.
Its central recommendation was the establishment of a national support function to coordinate actors, provide guidance, monitor international developments, and liaise with relevant security agencies.
Research security in practice
The challenges identified in the governmental report were also reflected in the data-gathering phase. While HEIs reported having internal routines for evaluating partnerships, the degree of centralized oversight and the administrative capacity to store, identify, and process relevant information varied considerably.
Internal checklists and risk matrices draw on diverse sources, including official STINT and UKÄ guidance as well as, for instance, ASPI’s Defense Universities Tracker, the Foreign Ministry’s positions, and input from the Swedish Security Service. This diversity does not necessarily indicate shortcomings, but it does complicate national comparisons and underscores the value of greater coordination. Some faculties also flagged a lack of concrete operational routines at the research group level.
These findings support the push for a national support function, even as some reviewing agencies cautioned against an overly broad mandate. The government has welcomed these developments under the banner “As open as possible – as secure as necessary.” In May 2025, the Swedish Research Council was tasked with developing and operationalizing the national guidelines. Among respondents, there appears to be a cautious approach toward renewals, with some institutions maintaining existing cooperation frameworks in anticipation of the new guidelines.
HEIs generally appear to view research security measures with understanding, though broader concerns exist that overly prescriptive mandates could restrict academic freedom or create excessive bureaucratic burdens. These concerns were echoed in the 2024 Academic Freedom in Sweden survey by the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ), where a plurality (29%) of respondents reporting pressure on academic freedom cited political control and influence as their primary concern. Meanwhile, rectors from several leading universities argued publicly in 2025 that academic engagement with China should be strengthened in areas considered less sensitive from a security perspective, such as sustainability, resource scarcity, and the green transition.
Sweden-China academic engagements
Most identified links between Swedish HEIs and Chinese institutions focus on broader commitments to student, academic and staff exchanges. Among the minority of agreements specifying faculties or departments, non-STEM areas dominate, including law, business, management, languages and medicine. However, the most sensitive collaborations, especially those with defense-linked institutions, appear to center on STEM publications.
A 2023 meta-study by STINT found a rapid increase in joint research between Sweden and China from 2012 to 2021, with China rising from Sweden’s 12th-largest research partner to 4th-largest, and co-publication volumes tripling over the period. The most common co-publication fields between 2017 and 2021 were engineering, medicine, physics and astronomy, and materials science.
STINT also observed that many Sweden–China research links are initiated at the individual level rather than through centralized institutional channels. This may help explain why few HEIs were able to provide detailed overviews of active research collaborations for this study, with most submissions limited to general MoUs or framework agreements. The aggregate publication trends nonetheless point to extensive, albeit decentralized, research engagement.
A 2023 investigation by Svenska Dagbladet highlighted a steady rise in co-authored publications between Swedish and Chinese defense-linked institutions from 2010 to 2022. Of the 159 identified links in this study, 41 were categorized as high- or very-high-risk institutions by the ASPI Defense University Tracker. These notably included three academic links to the PLA-linked “Seven Sons of National Defense”: Linköping University (Faculty of Engineering) with Beijing Institute of Technology; KTH Royal Institute of Technology with Harbin Institute of Technology; and University West with Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Contractual and administrative features
Universities are required to self-report research or collaborations involving dual-use items, creating a regulatory grey zone in which the line between basic science and potential military applications is not always clear. In response, Technology Industries of Sweden, the Swedish Security and Defense Industry Association (SOFF), and the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (SUHF) jointly updated their 2018 guidelines in September 2025 to help universities and companies mitigate risks such as industrial espionage.
More recent cooperation agreements with Chinese counterparts typically include clearer contractual provisions, such as explicitly mandated review and renewal clauses, rather than automatic rollovers.
Swedish universities generally do not record students’ nationality or home institution due to legal and privacy constraints. Exchange students are typically registered under their host institution rather than their home university. Consequently, students or doctoral candidates originally enrolled at a higher-risk institution but studying at a European university and on exchange at a Swedish university would officially appear as students of the European host institution, even though this distinction is recognized.
Non-academic collaborations
This research focuses primarily on HEIs. However, Malin Frenning, the CEO of RISE, has noted that most research and innovation considered sensitive from a national security perspective takes place within research institutes and private companies. While welcoming stronger research security, she has cautioned that any national support function must be designed in a way that remains relevant for these actors. Even for public research institutes, much of their applied or contract-based research is not subject to full public access when it involves commercial interests, national security, or sensitive personal data. Collaboration outside the university sector, therefore, falls outside the scope of this study.
Recommendations
- Finalize the national guidelines so that universities can start adjusting their procedures and partnerships with greater clarity.
- Set up the national support function to help coordinate universities, share good practices, and offer practical tools for risk assessment, while avoiding an overly broad or bureaucratic mandate.
- Keep research institutes and the private sector in view, since much of the sensitive applied research takes place outside universities.
- Work with the academic community, ensuring that stronger research security goes hand in hand with academic freedom and international openness.
Explore more data on Sweden-China academic engagements here.
