The Max Planck Society in China

This chapter examines the evolving role of the Max Planck Society (MPS) as the most prominent scientific organization in the China policy of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Due to the specific geopolitical constellation in the final years of the Cultural Revolution, the MPS acted as a commissioned but largely autonomous partner of the FRG’s foreign policy in the 1970s. From the mid-1980s, the MPS gradually relinquished its foreign policy functions to other West German scientific organizations, expanding its direct cooperation with the emerging elite institutions of the Chinese science system instead—without any recognizable interference from the German Federal Government. The instruments of bilateral cooperation tested in China during this time were to form the basis for the internationalization strategy pursued by the MPS since the 2000s with emerging partner countries. Only recently has the MPS had to come to terms with the Federal Government’s call for German science organizations active in China to join the new China policy of “de-risking,” faced once again with the geopolitical context in its quest for globalized scientific cooperation.