After the EC-Bridge project in 2004, the EU and China agreed to deepen cooperation. In 2005, they signed a framework cooperation agreement and participated in the TEIN2 project. However, the bandwidth between China and the European academic network GEANT in the TEIN2 project was only 622M, which was very limited. The EU and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology therefore decided to implement the ORIENT China-Europe project to increase the connection bandwidth of CERNET/CERNET2 and GEANT from 622M to 2.5G.

The ORIENT project was a four-year project launched in 2007. The project aimed to establish a high-speed interconnection of the China-EU academic network to promote cooperation and development; the project would also promote the cooperation in the information technology field, including GRID, Galileo Program and the EU Sixth and Seventh Framework Programs that especially require high-speed network support. The project would also help build the important position of China's Internet in Asia. 

After the ORIENT project, the EU and the Chinese government continued to support ORIENTplus and follow-up related projects to further promote China-EU multi-faceted cooperation in the Internet field.