The 19th China-Germany Joint Committee Meeting for S&T cooperation was held in Berlin, Germany, on April 5, 2006. Shang Yong, vice minster of science and technology of China, and Frieder Meyer-Krahmer, state secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, led their respective delegations.

Vice Minister Shang gave his German counterparts a detailed account of the “Outline of China’s National Medium and Long Term S&T Development Plan (2006-2020)”. He explained that China’s S&T development strategy is to build China into an innovative country. He also stressed the outline's influence upon Sino-German S&T cooperation.

At the meeting, reports on progress of bilateral cooperation were delivered to the Joint Committee by the project steering committees in professional areas like laser technology, communications and information technology, geological study, marine research, eco-research and environmental technology, bio-technology, cultural relics protection, etc.

Vice Minister Shang Yong held talks with Dr. Annette Schavan, federal minister of the German Ministry of Education and Research. Both sides stressed the importance of variety in the types of long term cooperation, and agreed to expand bilateral S&T cooperation to areas such as clean energy, renewable energy and the life sciences.  

Vice Minister Shang told Minister Schavan that China would further strengthen S&T cooperation with Germany in the fields of energy, environmental protection and high-tech. He said that China would continue to improve the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) and wishes to achieve a win-win cooperation between China and Germany.

Shang also met with Jörg Hennerkes, state secretary of the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development, and Matthias Machnig, state secretary of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. They exchanged ideas of cooperation in fields such as the Galileo Project, magnetic levitation, utilization of renewable resources in the area of transportation and the research and development of renewable resources and clean development mechanism (CDM).

Backgrounder

China and Germany established diplomatic relations in 1972 and S&T cooperation relations in November 1978 by signing the China-Germany S&T cooperation agreement. For nearly 30 years, the S&T cooperation between the two countries has been steady in progress with following features:

1. Based on the agreement of inter-governmental cooperation, a series of cooperation agreements and protocols have been signed between corresponding sectors, national S&T organizations, and science foundations of both countries. A multi-level, multi-channel, and multi-mode S&T cooperation structure was set up;

2. The cooperation has been expanding. To date, bilateral cooperation covers almost all key areas of science and technology, from basic research to applied research, from traditional areas of energy, environment, agriculture and health, to high-tech areas of aerospace, information technology, bio-technology, new materials, advanced manufacturing and automation;

3. Modes of cooperation are getting more varied. In addition to sending visiting scholars to each other and jointly holding symposiums and workshops, new modes of cooperation have been adopted such as setting up “groups of young scientists”, “joint laboratories” and “joint research institutes”;

4. Besides cooperation between research institutes and universities, both countries have paid great attention to absorbing industrial enterprises into cooperation, which has brought out obvious results in the fields of laser, advanced manufacturing technology and renewable energy.