The Change of China’s S&T Policy Style: a discourse institutionalism approach

Science and technology (S&T) policies play the important role in China’s S&T development proven by China’s progress. As the context varies, the policies changes as well. It is valuable to analyze what changes and what remains during the policy change. This paper introduces policy style and adjusts institutional grammar firstly provided by Ostrom as the method, discourse institutionalism to analyse and compare two most important policies of China’s S&T reform in 1985 and 2015 to reveal the change of policy style. We find that 1) China’s S&T policies always are economic-oriented from 1980s ; 2) higher-level leadership gets involved into the S&T policy recently and top-level design dominates over local practice; 3) governmental intervention becomes more indirectly and companies become more active and have more autonomy in decision-making. Furthermore, we illustrate two cases of hybrid rice, high speed railway, as the empirical studies, to testify our findings of policy change and to show how policy styles actually work in different eras.