Measuring China’s International Technology Catchup

Drivers of China’s Convergence to Innovation Leaders

“…As of 2017, the leaders in inward FDI and outward FDI stock were the coastal provinces of Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Shandong, Beijing and Jiangsu (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2020). China's innovation landscape is however highly concentrated in three cities -Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which account for 66.3% of United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patents (Jiang et al, 2020), host emerging sectors (Zhao et al, 2010), and lead in international inventive and scientific collaboration (WIPO, 2019). Their followers are Guangzhou, Chengdu, Xi'an, Tianjin, Chongqing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, Ningbo and Dalian (Fudan Institute of Industrial Development, Di Yi Caijing Yanjiuyuan Research and Research Institute of Chinese Economy Fudan University, 2017; Wang et al, 2015;WIPO, 2019).…”

“…Lindtner examined the "displacement of technological promise" from the United States to China, demonstrating how China, which was long viewed as a country not capable of innovating, has recently come to be perceived as a prototype nation, a "place to prototype alternatives to existing models of modern technological progress" (Lindtner, 2020: 6). The assessment of China's technological catching up based on patent counts as well as patent quality shows that the country has been converging to technological frontier countries such as Germany or South Korea, with the growing likelihood of surpassing them by 2025 (Jiang et al, 2020). Dynamic processes of increasing the innovative potential of China provide a solid base for further convergence and diminishing the innovation gap between this country and more developed economies, such as the European Union (Kowalski, 2020).…”

Greening the international monetary system? Not without addressing the political ecology of global imbalances

“…In this context, while China has increasingly managed to move up the value chain in key sectors such as information technology, a fact that seems to be of greatest concern in the media and the academic community alike (e.g. Jiang et al, 2020), this shift brings its own material and energetic requirements. Indeed, the ecologically-grounded lens developed in this paper indicates that the pursuit of Chinese economic development cannot materially occur without pumping in resources from the rest of the world.…”

Relatedness, Complexity, and Economic Growth in Chinese Cities

“…In 2019, China filed more patent applications with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) than the United States, thereby becoming the top-ranked country in terms of global knowledge production. While the meaning of statistics such as this is sure to generate significant debate around questions of patent quality and subsidies (Lei, Sun, and Wright 2012; Dang and Motohashi 2015; Jiang, Shi, and Jefferson 2020), there is little doubt that China views innovation as key to its future growth and competitive advantage, as the “Made in China 2025” and “Industry 4.0” programs make clear (Li 2018). The last few decades have seen China prioritize investment in innovation, with gross domestic spending on overall R&D now being second only to the United States (China Power Team 2019) and with venture capital funding in China topping that in the United States for the first time in 2018 (Economist 2019).…”