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There are a variety of reasons underlying the remarkable development of science and technology (S&T), and innovation in post-1978 China. This book seeks to achieve an understanding of such development from an institutional or a political economy perspective. Departing from the literature of S&T and innovation studies that treats innovation as a market or enterprise's behavior in Schumpeter's sense, Sun and Cao argue that it involves politics, institutions, and the role of the state. In particular, they examine how the Chinese state has played its visible role in making innovation policies, allocating funding for R&D programs, making efforts to attract talent, and organizing critical S&T programs. This book appeals to scholars in S&T and innovation policy, political economy, innovation governance, and China studies as well as policymakers and business executives.
The sixth chapter extends theoretical and empirical interests in understanding the role of the Chinese government through its organization of mission-oriented mega-R&D programs (MMRDs). In particular, this chapter proposes a theoretical framework with a particular focus on such programs’ three contextual characteristics – technical goal of the mission, dominant actor, and end-user. We then apply the framework to ten cases across different historical periods and sectors in different countries to test its validity. The finding suggests that exploitative R&D with a clear and singular technical goal whose performer and end-user are public actors entails government to adopt MMRDs, while in doing so the government also should take into consideration such factors as economic efficiency, national security, and public interests. In the case of China, the state-led innovation model favors to concentrate resources on initiating MMRDs.
In examining the effect of Chinese talent-attracting programs launched by the Chinese government, with few exceptions, studies have rarely assessed these programs empirically and pertinently. We intend to fill the gap by assessing an important central government program – the Youth Thousand Talents Program – in Chapter Five. We start with proposing a transnational migration matrix of the academics to clarify the dynamic mechanism of achieving an academic brain gain at the high end. The transnational migration matrix suggests that the academics with high ability have competitiveness in both overseas and domestic academic job markets and can especially enjoy a higher salary and academic reputation in the host (overseas) academic job market due to the more mature mechanism of academic evaluation relative to their home country. The results show that some scholars whose last employer’s academic ranking is among the world’s Top 100 have stronger willingness to return. Compared to scholars with an overseas tenure-track position, those with a tenure position or a permanent position tended to stay overseas, the rate of their staying abroad increased with ages.
This chapter presents the background and motivations of the book, clarifies the questions it tries to answer and explains its organizational structure.
China’s rapid growth of R&D expenditure has attracted wide attention from the international scientific and policy communities. We try to open the “black box” of China’s central R&D expenditure based on an analytical framework of “funding−performing” in Chapter Four. Specifically, the chapter solves a major mystery regarding China’s central government’s R&D expenditure – who spends how much on what. By using data released by central government agencies with mission in S&T and innovation between 2011 and 2020, we find that the allocation of the central R&D expenditure has become decentralized and diversified, which has posed new challenges for China’s R&D budget management. Much of the public money has financed scientific research, but the nation’s overall R&D funding has been oriented toward development research, thus pointing to a possibility that China’s efforts to build an enterprise-centered innovation system may lack a solid scientific foundation. The findings are helpful for understanding China’s S&T budgeting process and spending patterns as well as funding structure.
Taking the policy network approach, this chapter investigates three mechanisms – policy agenda, power concentration and heterogeneity dependence – underlying the evolution of inter-government agency relations in China. Operationally, the chapter adopts a social network analysis-based method to quantitatively study China’s innovation policy network. The findings show that the formal policy network for innovation has not only sustained through the intervention of policy agenda but also self-organized because of policy network’s nature of power concentration and heterogeneity dependence. The presence of such mixed mechanisms in the evolution of China’s innovation policy network differs from the findings from industrialized countries where self-organization plays a central role. The findings advance our theoretical understanding of the evolution of innovation policy network and have implications for policymaking in emerging economies.
This chapter reviews the literature on the political economy of S&T and innovation, including the evolution from the national innovation system to a political economic approach, and proposes a conceptual framework to open the “black box” of the states role in S&T and innovation activities.
This chapter is about how China’s innovation policies have evolved to reflect a changing and supposedly better understanding of the innovation by China’s policymakers. It carries out a quantitative analysis of 630 innovation policies issued by China’s central government ministries from 1980 to 2019. It concludes that China has shifted its S&T and industrial policy-centered innovation strategy and pursued a more coordinated innovation-oriented economic development by giving increasing attention to a portfolio of policies that also include financial, tax, and fiscal measures. There has been a gradual departure from the pattern in which innovation policies are formulated by one single government agency, therefore steering China to a different and probably more promising innovation trajectory.
Our final chapter concludes the book by summarizing the findings from our studies of the political economy of S&T and innovation in China, discussing tensions faced by China through the perspective of the political economy in the studies of S&T and innovation in China, and drawing some governance implications for the political economic study of China’s S&T and innovation in general.
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