China’s Absorptive State
Research, Innovation, and the Prospects for China-U.K. Collaboration
on October 1, 2013
A great deal of speculation surrounds China’s prospects in science and innovation, as with other aspects of China’s development and heightened visibility on the global stage. The same pitfalls—of hype, generalization, and only partial awareness of the domestic political, economic, and cultural context—mean that discussion of this topic in Europe and the U.S. can sometimes obscure as much as it illuminates. China’s innovation system is advancing so rapidly in multiple directions that the U.K. needs to develop a more ambitious and tailored strategy, able to maximize opportunities and minimize risks across the diversity of its innovation links to China. For the U.K., the choice is not whether to engage more deeply with the Chinese system, but how. Innovation is caught up in a bigger unfolding debate about the pace, scale, and direction of China’s economic and political reforms. Much still depends upon the playing out of a set of tensions: between the planned economy and the market; national and global priorities; the hardware of research infrastructure and the software of culture and ethics; the skills and creativity of home–grown talent, and the entrepreneurialism and networks of returnees. In the decades to come, China is likely to change innovation just as much as innovation changes China.
