It's dead weird the relationship between the UK and China y'know. It's not all antipathy, but it does always seem not too far away. Recently the MRC partnered up with the equivalent Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) to launch a scheme focused on antimicrobial resistance and pandemic preparedness. Had to be a collaboration between UK and Chinese researchers. MRC would fund the UK arm and MoST the Chinese researchers.
It's a fairly common model where applications are submitted to both funders in collaboartive international research. Whilst I wasn't directly involved in any bids, I gather from folk I know on the UK side of one bid it all got a bit weird to the point they dropped the bid at the 11th hour. Subsequently learned they weren't alone, so others got dropped.
Apparently the Chinese submission process wanted names, addresses, passport number, DOB and all sorts of other sensitive data about the UK researchers.
MRC also apparently had no idea MoST would be asking for all sorts of stuff that is out of bounds in the UK. And certainly doesn't happen when running a similar scheme with, say, Japan or Canada or EU countries.
Shame really, good science potentially scuppered by suspicion and mistrust (on both sides). Can't imagine it'll make future collaborations between countries any easier because MRC got a lot of flak and naturally now have to address the issue.
