As a priority for China’s neighboring diplomacy and a key Belt and Road region, ASEAN is of profound significance for China-ASEAN science, technology and people-to-people exchanges. As an integral component of such exchanges, science popularization serves as a valuable observation window to gain insights into the status of science, technology and people-to-people exchanges. Based on the practical experience of China-ASEAN science popularization exchanges, this paper reviews the current development status in the fields of youth science and technology education, science and technology venue cooperation, science popularization resource sharing, and the establishment of cooperation mechanisms. It finds that bilateral cooperation still faces challenges including inadequate top-level design and supporting guarantees, the lack of a nationally coordinated collaborative framework, and the insufficient level of exchanges and cooperation. Accordingly, this paper proposes taking ASEAN as the priority direction of China’s foreign science popularization cooperation, and putting forward targeted measures including improving top-level design, promoting “all-region, all-stakeholder” coordination, deepening targeted cooperation, and elevating the level and quality of exchanges and cooperation. These measures are designed to further give full play to the role of science popularization in science, technology and people-to-people exchanges, strengthen the soft support for hard cooperation in economic and trade ties and regional security, and advance the building of a closer China-ASEAN community with a shared future.
Zhang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.