Given the near-silence in technological and business history about post-World War II socialist enterprises, this book gives voice to a generation of Communist China’s managers, entrepreneurs, cadres, and workers from the Liberation to the early 1970s. Using recently-opened online archival resources, it details and assesses the course of technical and organizational experimentation at state-owned, cooperative, and private enterprises as the PRC strove to construct a socialist economy through trial-and-error initiatives. Core questions treated are: How did Chinese enterprises operate, evolve, experiment, improvise and adjust during the PRC’s first generation? What technological initiatives were crucial to these processes, necessarily developed with limited expertise and thin financial resources? How could constructing “socialism with Chinese characteristics” have helped lay foundations for the post-1980 “Chinese miracle,” as the PRC confidently entered the 21st century while Soviet and Central European socialisms crumbled? And what might current-day Western managers and entrepreneurs learn from Chinese practice and performance a half-century ago? Readers can anticipate a granular, bottom-up analysis of how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how managers and technicians emerged after the capitalist exodus, how organizations experimented and adapted, and how the controversies and convulsions of the PRC’s early decades fashioned durable technical and organizational capabilities.

China is in the midst of transitioning from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by innovation and knowledge. This up-to-date analysis evaluates China's state-led approach to science and technology, and its successes and failures. In recent decades, China has seen huge investments in high-tech science parks, a surge in home-grown top-ranked global companies, and a significant increase in scientific publications and patents. Helped by state policies and a flexible business culture, the country has been able to leapfrog its way to a more globally competitive position. However, the authors argue that this approach might not yield the same level of progress going forward if China does not address serious institutional, organizational, and cultural obstacles. While not impossible, this task may well prove to be more difficult for the Chinese Communist Party than the challenges that China has faced in the past.

China's extraordinary economic development is explained in large part by the way it innovates. Contrary to widely held views, China's innovation machine is not created and controlled by an all-powerful government. Instead, it is a complex, interdependent system composed of various elements, involving bottom-up innovation driven by innovators and entrepreneurs and highly pragmatic and adaptive top-down policy. Using case studies of leading firms and industries, along with statistics and policy analysis, this book argues that China's innovation machine is similar to a natural ecosystem. Innovations in technology, organization, and business models resemble genetic mutations which are initially random, self-serving, and isolated, but the best fitting are selected by the market and their impacts are amplified by the innovation machine. This machine draws on China's multitude manufacturers, supply chains, innovation clusters, and digitally literate population, connected through super-sized digital platforms. China's innovation suffers from a lack of basic research and reliance upon certain critical technologies from overseas, yet its scale (size) and scope (diversity) possess attributes that make it self-correcting and stronger in the face of challenges. China's innovation machine is most effective in a policy environment where the market prevails; policy intervention plays a significant role when market mechanisms are premature or fail. The future success of China's innovation will depend on continuing policy pragmatism, mass innovation, and entrepreneurship, and the development of the 'new infrastructures'.

From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin's history details the novel ways in which Zigong merchants mobilized capital through financial-industrial networks and spurred growth by developing new technologies, capturing markets, and building integrated business organizations. She provides new insight into the forces and institutions that shaped Chinese economic and social development (independent of Western or Japanese influence) and challenges long-held beliefs that social structure, state extraction, the absence of modern banking, and cultural bias against business precluded industrial development in China.

China has become an innovation powerhouse in high-tech industries, but the widely held view assumes the Chinese model is built on technological borrowing and state capitalism. This book debunks the myths surrounding the Chinese model with a fresh take on China’s strategies for technological innovation. The central argument is that indigenous innovation plays a critical role in transforming the Chinese high-tech industry. Like any successfully industrialized nation in history, indigenous innovation in China allows industrial enterprises to assimilate knowledge developed elsewhere, utilize science and technology resources and human capabilities accumulated in the country, and eventually approach the technological frontier. The question is, how do Chinese businesses and governments engage in indigenous innovation? Employing the "social conditions of innovative enterprise" framework developed by William Lazonick and colleagues, this book analyzes how the interaction of strategy, organization, and finance in leading Chinese high-tech firms underpinned by national institutions enables indigenous innovation with Chinese characteristics. It features detailed case studies of two critical high-tech industries—the telecom-equipment industry and the semiconductor industry—and within them, the business histories of leading Chinese innovators. The in-depth look into China’s experience in indigenous innovation provides valuable lessons for advanced and emerging economies.

"This book creates the concept of “enterprise organization engineering” by introducing the paradigm of tissue engineering in life science into enterprise organization research. It regards the enterprise as live organization, which has life characters and ability to grow and self-repair. The authors seek origins from seven theories including human tissue engineering, evolutionary economics, organization theories, enterprise theories, entrepreneur theory, human recourse theory, knowledge management theory, and summarizes the research framework including five parts : research on enterprise life characteristics, enterprise genes, enterprise seed cells, enterprise life scaffolds and research on enterprise growth factors. This research framework, which bases on five principles, presents a new perspective for corporate management staff and riches management theories."

Offering a comprehensive review of reform policy, followed by an examination of major approaches to institutional restructuring, Shulin Gu explores the way in which China's industrial technology has responded to economic reforms. At the heart of the work is the argument that market reform and organisational change are closely interdependent. Gu outlines the interaction of the two in China and reveals the damage which may result if market reform is not accompanied by new organisational design. Analysis of these issues is drawn from first-hand experience of Chinese technology systems, supported by insights from technological innovation economics and transaction cost economics.