Blakemore first visited China in 1974, during the Cultural Revolution, and collaborated in research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Biophysics, Beijing, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His efforts to develop scientific relations between the United Kingdom and China were recognised in 2012 when he received the Friendship Award, the People's Republic of China's highest award for "foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country's economic and social progress". In 2012 he was appointed a Master of the Beijing DeTao Masters Academy.