China as an Innovation Nation

This volume assesses China's transition to innovation-nation status in terms of social conditions, industry characteristics and economic impacts over the past three decades, also providing insights into future developments. Defining innovation as the process that generates a higher quality, lower cost product than was previously available, the introductory chapter conceptualizes the theory of an innovation nation and the lessons from Japan and Untied States. It outlines the key governance, employment and investment institutions that China must build for such transition to occur, and examines China's challenges and strategies to innovate in the era of global production systems. Two succeeding chapters explain the evolving roles of Chinese state in innovation, and the new landscape of venture capital finance. The remaining chapters provide studies of major industries, which contain analyses of the evolving roles of investment by government agencies and business interests in the process. Included in these studies are traditional industries such as mechanical engineering, railroads, and automobiles; rapidly evolving and internationally highly integrated industries such as information-and-communication-technology (ICT); and newly emerging sectors such as wind and solar energy. Written by leading academics in the field, studies in this volume reveal Chinese innovation as diverse across industries and enterprises and fluid over time. In each sector, we observe continued co-evolution of state policy, market demand, and technology development. The strategies and structures of individual companies and industrial ecosystems are changing rapidly. The sum total of the studies is a great step forward in our understanding of the industrial foundations of China's attempt to become an innovation nation. Contributors to this volume - Shin-Horng CHEN Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, Taiwan Debin DU School of Urban and Regional Sciences, East China Normal University, China Peilei FAN Michigan State University, USA Kaidong FENG School of Government, Peking University, China Xudong GAO School of Economics and Management (SEM), Tsinghua University, China Matt HOPKINS Center for Industrial Competitiveness, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA Zhaodong (Tony) HUANG Ningbo University, China William LAZONICK Center for Industrial Competitiveness, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA Joanna I. LEWIS Georgetown University, USA Yin LI School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA Ingo LIEFNER Department of Geography, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany Xielin LIU Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Rongfang (Rachel) LIU New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA Liu (Willow) LV New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA Yifei SUN Department of Geography, California State University Northridge, USA Pei-Chang WEN Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, Taiwan Zi XUE Shanghai Semiconductor Industry Association, China Jun ZHANG Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Canada Gang ZENG School of Urban and Regional Sciences, East China Normal University, China Yu ZHOU Department of Geography and Geology, Vassar College, USA