Book Project

Re-Innovation Nation: The Logic of Technology Transfer Policy in China

My book project examines how strategic interests and China’s bargaining power over foreign firms shape its use of technology transfer policies. I argue that national power and regime legitimacy concerns lead China to pursue technology transfers in strategically important industries, such as high-speed rail, aircraft manufacturing, and semiconductors. However, the Chinese state’s policy enforcement capacity and China’s position in global value chains constrain its leverage over foreign investors, limiting the use of these policies even in highly strategic sectors. China’s bargaining power over investors is weakest, I argue, when enforcement capacity is low and when China occupies an intermediate position in transnational production networks, such that most of what is imported into China is not consumed there, but rather processed locally and re-exported, as more finished goods, to consumers overseas. In these industries, China’s reliance on foreign firms and the value chains they control to sustain export growth and associated employment limits its use of formal technology transfer policies.

I evaluate these arguments using an original industry-level data set on technology transfer policies from 1995-2020 and qualitative case studies. The data set, based on manual analysis of over 500 pages of Chinese-language central state laws and regulations, reveals that strategic industries account for most of the increase in the use of technology transfer policies after 2001. At the same time, China is more than twice as likely to use these policies in strategic industries in the bottom 10 percent in terms of the share of imports tied to export-processing trade than in similarly strategic high-technology sectors in the top 10 percent. Case studies of technology transfer efforts in wind turbine manufacturing, semiconductor design and fabrication, and aircraft design and manufacturing provide compelling evidence that reliance on foreign firms constrains China’s use of tech transfer tools when China is intermediate to global production processes.

Working Papers

“Scaling the Commanding Heights: The Logic of Technology Transfer Policy in Rising China,” Revise and Resubmit

Click here for brief on the paper published by the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions (SCCEI).

“The Economic Effects of Joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Implications for Assessing Chinese Influence,” Under Review, with M. Taylor Fravel, Eleanor Freund, and Raymond Wang

Selected Works in Progress

“From ‘Trading the Market’ to ‘Self-Reliance’: The Evolution of Chinese Foreign Technology Policy”

“Market Structure and the Political Economy Bargaining Over Technology Transfer”

“Chinese Industrial and Technology Policy Dataset, 1978-2020” with Taegyun Lim

“Assessing the Causes, Conduct, and Implications of the U.S.-China Chip War,” with M. Taylor Fravel