Professor Bernard Slippers, Director of FABI and Prof. Mike Wingfield recently visited the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Pretoria to receive a gift of a large number of protective face masks from the newly-appointed Minister Counselor (Science and Technology), Mr Shen Long.  This visit also provided the opportunity for discussions with Mr Shen Long and his colleagues Dr Xu Pan and Dr Yu Pang regarding the China-South Africa Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Forest Science that has been agreed upon by the Governments of the two countries and supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in China and the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) in South Africa. The JRC, still to be formally launched but already operational on the China side, has FABI as the South African partner and the China Eucalyptus Research Centre (CERC), Chinese Academy of Forestry (CAF) as the Chinese partner. The China team is led by Prof. ShuaiFei Chen (also an adjunct member of the UP Faculty) and the South Africa team by Prof. Bernard Slippers. The engagement with Mr Long and his staff led to fruitful discussions regarding finalizing the South African side of the Implementation Plan, the formal launch of the JRC (hopefully early in 2021) and opportunities to extend the research and educational initiatives between China and South Africa to include areas such as food security and microbial (primarily fungal) biotechnology.  The importance of the foundation that the research relationship between FABI and CAF has established over more than 25 years was highlighted. This was recognized as a platform to establish new and important new initiatives between the two groups and also with their respective collaborators.