Professor Yuzhuo Cai of The Education University of Hong Kong participated in the international symposium Higher Education in a Changing Era: Navigating Pathways to the Global Common Good, held at the Institute of Education, Xiamen University, from 3 to 6 April 2026. The symposium brought together leading scholars to discuss higher education in a period of major global change through keynote speeches, thematic forums, roundtable discussions, and concluding reflections. On 3 April, Professor Cai spoke at the thematic forum, Higher Education Cooperation in the New Geopolitical Context: Tensions and Pathways. His presentation, titled The New Geopolitics of EU–China Higher Education Cooperation: Paradoxes and Pathways Forward, examined how EU–China higher education cooperation is being reshaped by geopolitical tensions, changing understandings of openness, research security concerns, and questions of reciprocity.
In the presentation, Professor Cai argued that the future of EU–China higher education cooperation does not lie in a return to earlier assumptions of broad and lightly regulated engagement. Instead, it requires a more differentiated and strategically grounded approach. He identified five enduring paradoxes in contemporary cooperation and proposed several pathways forward, including differentiated cooperation architectures, calibrated reciprocity, proportionate research security, stronger institutional dialogue, and a renewed orientation towards the global common good. According to the conference report, he emphasised that the key tension in recent years has been between autonomy and openness, and suggested that cooperation should be reoriented from strategic response towards a global common good perspective embedded in university governance and academic practice.