George Freeman (Conservative)

As one of the world’s fastest growing economies, China plays a critical role in addressing many of the world’s most urgent challenges such as tackling climate change and preventing antimicrobial resistance. It is important that we continue to work with China in these areas, and BEIS will build on our collaboration to date with China to address those key global challenges together, as set out in the integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy.

BEIS will not be using ODA funding to support research and innovation partnerships with China as we have previously done through ODA vehicles, such as the Newton fund and global challenges research fund. Existing ODA-funded activity with China through these will finish by the end of financial year 2022-23. The technical assistance we have provided through our UK partnering for accelerated climate transitions programme (UK PACT) is also no longer from our ODA from the end of financial year 2021-22 and, instead, technical assistance to China on climate change issues will be smaller in scale and use non-ODA sources.

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