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.

As the greatest coal-producing and consuming nation in the world, China would seem an unlikely haven for wind power. Yet the country now boasts a world-class industry that promises to make low-carbon technology more affordable and available to all. Conducting an empirical study of China's remarkable transition and the possibility of replicating their model elsewhere, Joanna I. Lewis adds greater depth to a theoretical understanding of China's technological innovation systems and its current and future role in a globalized economy. Lewis focuses on China's specific methods of international technology transfer, its forms of international cooperation and competition, and its implementation of effective policies promoting the development of a home-grown industry. Just a decade ago, China maintained only a handful of operating wind turbines—all imported from Europe and the United States. Today, the country is the largest wind power market in the world, with turbines made almost exclusively in its own factories. Following this shift reveals how China's political leaders have responded to domestic energy challenges and how they may confront encroaching climate change. The nation's escalation of its wind power use also demonstrates China's ability to leapfrog to cleaner energy technologies—an option equally viable for other developing countries hoping to bypass gradual industrialization and the "technological lock-in" of hydrocarbon-intensive energy infrastructure. Though setbacks are possible, China could one day come to dominate global wind turbine sales, becoming a hub of technological innovation and a major instigator of low-carbon economic change.

Innovation studies have long been confined to the theoretical system established by the scholars of developed countries in the West. It is difficult to use these studies to understand the real nature and law of technological innovation in developing countries. This book, in an innovative manner, studies the theoretical system of secondary innovation, and reveals the evolution law and dynamic innovation mode of the activities carried out by technologically backward countries. It does so by laying an important foundation for the development of management science theory on the basis of the standpoint and characteristics of developing countries.

A pressing investigation into the global implications of China's shift to an innovation economy. As China shifts to an economy driven by innovation and productivity growth, the global implications of this transition will be significant. Amid the rise of techno-nationalism and a changing strategic calculus around the world, the manner and means of China's transition faces a high degree of scrutiny. China is attempting to balance a reliance on overseas sources of technology alongside efforts to strengthen domestic innovation capabilities as a hedge against the risks of a United States-led "decoupling." In these circumstances, it is essential to understand the many different forces of change within China, and the way China responds to outside changes. The evolution of China's innovation economy will be one of the key economic stories of the early twenty-first century, and the world will need China as a source of innovation in the decades ahead. The aim of this book is to help build a better framework for policymakers to find a new equilibrium in negotiating the terms of an oncoming shift in geopolitics.

A rigorous examination of the motivations, sources, obstacles to and consequences of China's drive to become a leading innovative nation.

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'.

In the past three decades, China has successfully transformed itself from an extremely poor economy to the world’s second largest economy. The country’s phenomenal economic growth has been sustained primarily by its rapid and continuous industrialization. Currently industry accounts for nearly two-fifths of China’s gross domestic product, and since 2009 China has been the world’s largest exporter of manufactured products. This book explores the question of how far this industrial growth has been the product of government policies. It discusses how government policies and their priorities have developed and evolved, examines how industrial policies are linked to policies in other areas, such as trade, technology and regional development, and assesses how new policy initiatives are encouraging China’s increasing success in new technology-intensive industries. It also demonstrates how China’s industrial policies are linked to development of industrial clusters and regions.