On November 18th, Annual General Meeting 2022 Jiangsu-UK World-class University Consortium was held in Nanjing. Nearly 200 representatives from 32 universities in Jiangsu and 17 universities in the UK attended the Meeting online and offline. Prof. Ding Jianning, president of YZU, was invited to speak at the Presidents Forum and preside over the Academic Forum on Advanced Manufacturing.

Prof. Ding pointed out the cooperation in education had played an active role in enhancing mutual trust and benefiting our two peoples since China established diplomatic ties with the UK, the profound influence of which could not be ignored. He said, what we had always pursued was to deepen practical cooperation, deal with difficulties and problems and share the opportunities met in the future, which would allow us to further improve the cooperation level of our two countries. That meant progress made in bilateral cooperation was also in the interests of China and the UK. He suggested the following steps must be taken. First, consensus on stronger cooperation should be reached. It was of top priority that we made full use of the mechanism for high quality development. Second,wider cooperation should be realized through university-industry-research collaboration and the transformation of S&T outcomes. Third, more resources should be made available to write a new Sino-UK education chapter through win-win cooperation.

When presiding over the Academic Forum on Advanced Manufacturing, Prof. Ding said that new technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence started to stay focused on the application area, bringing unprecedented development opportunities and challenges to the multinational manufacturing industry. He hoped that China-UK scholars would take the Academic Forum as an opportunity to produce more valuable findings from critical thinking and targeted research. Additionally, closer international cooperation relations should be tied to promote the development of advanced manufacturing, and therefore greatly contribute to the economic and social progress of our two countries.