The degree of collaborative research between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United Kingdom (UK) in the field of hypersonic flight was examined using the same corpus of open-source scientific works used in CASI’s prior report, “An Exploratory Analysis of the Chinese Hypersonics Research Landscape.” The total number of documents found with both Chinese and UK authorship was 424 out of the original corpus of 13,373. The quantity of hypersonics publications from the period of 2012-2020 increased by a factor of approximately 2.2 (Fig 1, left) and the number of distinct Chinese and UK institutions within a given calendar year increased by factors of approximately 3 and 2.8 for China and the UK respectively.
The results show that some of the most active Chinese universities collaborating with UK institutions have strong ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and China’s defense industry, meaning that any research collaboration with these universities is at risk of being utilized for military purposes.
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