2 - Innovation Policies

Summary

This chapter is about how China’s innovation policies have evolved to reflect a changing and supposedly better understanding of the innovation by China’s policymakers. It carries out a quantitative analysis of 630 innovation policies issued by China’s central government ministries from 1980 to 2019. It concludes that China has shifted its S&T and industrial policy-centered innovation strategy and pursued a more coordinated innovation-oriented economic development by giving increasing attention to a portfolio of policies that also include financial, tax, and fiscal measures. There has been a gradual departure from the pattern in which innovation policies are formulated by one single government agency, therefore steering China to a different and probably more promising innovation trajectory.