Book Project

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

My book project examines China’s efforts to accelerate its economic rise through foreign technology transfers in the decades after it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. I argue national power and regime legitimacy concerns led China to pursue technology transfers in strategic industries during this period, but that bureaucratic fragmentation within China and the country’s position in global production networks constrained its leverage vis-à-vis foreign investors, limiting the use of these policies even in highly strategic sectors such as semiconductor design and fabrication. Institutional reforms that centralized economic policy authority and mobilized the central state around the goal of industrial upgrading led to more energetic use of technology transfer policies over time, especially in industries in which China was largely downstream of global production processes as a final market. However, in sectors in which China occupied an intermediate position in global value chains — such that most of what entered China was not consumed there but processed and assembled into more finished goods for re-export to customers overseas — its reliance on foreign firms to drive export growth and employment undercut its leverage, limiting the use of these tools.

I evaluate these arguments using an original industry-level data set on technology transfer policies from 1995-2020 and in-depth qualitative case studies of China’s technology transfer efforts in wind energy, aircraft design and manufacturing, and semiconductor production. The data reveal that strategic industries account for most of the increase in the use of technology transfer policies after 2001, but that China is far more 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 those in the top 10 percent. Case studies provide compelling evidence that reliance on foreign firms constrains China’s use of technology transfer tools when it is intermediate to global production networks. My findings shed light how regulatory institutions and global value chains shape the political economy of bargaining over technology transfer between states and firms, as well as how position in production networks influenced the strategic choices behind China’s rise.

Working Papers

“Re-Innovation Nation: The Political Economy of Technology Transfer Policy in Post-WTO China,” Accepted, Journal of Politics

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

“Market Structure and Bargaining over Technology: Theory and Evidence from China,” Under Review

“The Weaponizer’s Dilemma and the Durability of Coercive Economic Statecraft,” with Austin M. Carson, Under Review

“Preventive Limited Economic Warfare: Explaining the US Semiconductor Controls on China” with M. Taylor Fravel

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