How does the Chinese state promote industrial upgrading and innovation? Answers from Brandt and Raws
Policy, Regulation, and Innovation in China’s Electricity and Telecom Industries Loren Brandt and Thomas G. Rawski The scale of China’s innovation ambitions inspires worldwide commentary, much of it poorly informed. Focusing on electricity, telecommunication, and semiconductors, this book offers a focused and detailed account of China’s effort to promote innovation. Massive application of human, policy, and financial resources shows great promise, but institutional obstacles, conflicting objectives, ill-advised policies, and Soviet-era legacies inject inefficiencies, resulting in a complex mosaic of success and failure in both technical and commercial dimensions. Thus, State Grid leads the w
Chapter 2: China’s Electricity and Communications Regulation in Global Context By Irene S. Wu Everywhere in China, there are phones and electricity. Compared to other countries at comparable levels of development, this is a remarkable achievement and a great boon to the quality of life for ordinary Chinese. Now that electricity and communications service are widely available nationwide, the next level goal is to maximize these services’ contribution to economic growth. This chapter has focused on five major regulatory issues: establishing a regulator, defining markets for competition policy, core network regulation, intersecting issues like media regulation and the environment, and implement
Chapter 3 Local Government and Firm Innovation in China’s Clean Energy Sector By Margaret M. Pearson As other chapters in this volume illustrate, it is clear that in some respects new energy industries in China have successfully upgraded, in terms of both cost and process, and perhaps product. Yet new energy industries also exhibit substantial variation across the sector. This chapter illustrates the path by which upgrading has occurred, most notably in the niche sector of low-speed electric vehicles (EVs). Development of this sector, interestingly, occurred with the strong support of subnational governments, but in contravention to explicit central government preferences. At the same time,
Chapter 5: When Global Technology Meets Local Standards: Reassessing China’s Communications Policy in the Age of Platform Innovation By Eric Thun and Timothy Sturgeon At the other end of the spectrum was Huawei, an equipment maker that demonstrated little early interest in investing in TD-SCDMA [a 3G standard]. While some observers attributed Huawei’s lack of enthusiasm for TD-SCDMA to uncertainty as to whether and how strongly the government would support the standard (Gao 2014), this misses the crucial point: Huawei’s orientation was explicitly global and the firm did not want to be distracted by a Chinese standard. In contrast to Datang, Huawei was not state-owned and received little stat
Chapter 10: Capability Upgrading and Catch-Up in Civil Nuclear Power: The Case of China By Ravi Madhavan, Thomas G. Rawski, and Qingfeng Tian This chapter analyzes China’s improbable progression from pygmy to emerging giant in civilian nuclear power. The Qinshan (Zhejiang) nuclear facility, a domestically developed plant rated at 298 MW, was connected to the grid in 1991. Twenty-five years later, the People’s Republic not only operates a fleet of thirty-eight nuclear plants and hosts more than one-third of global nuclear construction projects, but also boasts an extensive nuclear supply chain, stands on the brink of commercializing its own Hualong 1 (Dragon 1) reactor design, and is riding