During the 4th Education Summit, Fiona Hyslop, then Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning and Zhou Ji, then Chinese Minister of Education, signed an agreement on the Scotland-China Higher Education Research Partnership for PhD Studies. The ultimate objective of the Programme is to develop collaborative PhD programmes as a way of establishing long-term and mutually beneficial relationships between Chinese and Scottish higher education institutions or research consortia.

The agreed aims of the Programme are to raise awareness of research strengths in Scottish and Chinese higher education institutions; to build partnerships between research teams in the two countries’ higher education institutions in target sectors of mutual strength and interest; and to jointly develop PhD programmes by the research teams and exchange PhD students. To achieve these aims, the Programme will fund two areas of activity - mobility grants which will allow Chinese and Scottish research partners to visit one another to develop their partnership and related research proposals; and the exchange of PhD students. 17 partnerships' applications have been made successful.