Abstract
Since 1978, alongside China’s rise as a leading country in science, technology and innovation (STI), the studies of the country’s STI have been emerging as a field attracting increasing scholarly attention. Using the bibliometric method and the data from the Web of Science (WoS), this paper seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of the studies of China’s STI. The findings show that scholarly interests in China’s STI started in 1995 and have since developed rapidly; institutions in China, the U.S. and the U.K. are main contributors to the field, contributing 50%, 27.2% and 12% of the scholarship respectively, with Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences being three major institutional contributors. Seminal works have been focused on STI issues at the macro or national, meso or industrial and regional, and micro or organizational and firm levels. A possible agenda for further research is to develop new theories based on China’s practice paying specific attention to issues including R&D expenditure, S&T performance evaluation, regional innovation ecosystem, SOEs in innovation and the role of the Chinese Communist Party in innovation.
Highlights
Globalization, together with localization, blurs national boundaries but does not take critical roles away from the nation-state (Dicken 2007)
The national interest still is of prime importance within global governance (Sun and Grimes 2016), which is best exemplified by the recent frictions between China and the United States in trade and technology
Studying science & technology and innovation (STI) activities in China is central to understanding its international competitiveness in the knowledge-based economy
Summary
Globalization, together with localization, blurs national boundaries but does not take critical roles away from the nation-state (Dicken 2007). Some forty years later, in addition to displaying impressive achievements such as the increasing investment in research and development (R&D), the emergence of a very large talent pool whose quality has been improving, and a steady rise in the contributions of its scientists to international publications, China’s STI system has produced some major accomplishments in national defense, as well as in certain fields of basic research and technologies All these demonstrate that China has the institutional capacity to mobilize talent and the financial and material resources required to achieve high-priority, national-security objectives (Xue 1997; Suttmeier 1981)
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