For more than a decade Australia enjoyed a China-led mining boom that fuelled economic growth. Now, it is basking in a “knowledge boom”, as China overtakes the US as the nation’s leading international partner in producing scientific publications.

Data published by University of Technology Sydney on Wednesday show about one in six of Australia’s 85,351 scientific publications last year involved at least one Chinese-affiliated researcher. The number of Australia-China partnerships increased by 13.1 per cent in 2019 while collaborations with US researchers on scientific publications decreased by 0.3 per cent.

The report by the Australia-China Relations Institute at UTS says Australia is more intensively engaged with China than with its other main research partners — the US, UK, Germany and Canada — despite growing concerns in Canberra about espionage, cyber attacks and intellectual property theft perpetrated by foreign actors, particularly those linked to Beijing.