Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

After three decades of socialist restructuring, before China could create a contemporary innovation system, it needed first and foremost to rebuild a market-oriented economic system with enterprises which would invest in domestic science. The Chinese corporate sector, after its reconstruction, also had a crucial role to play in the development of China’s innovation capacities. Like China’s economic system, however, creating a Western-style innovation system from scratch had its challenges: the government installed numerous measures between the business and science sectors to employ companies in research funding. However, Chinese strategies and institutions borrowed from the West were built on very specific frameworks shaped by traditional and socialist China. Therefore, strategy implementation appeared to repeatedly encounter the same obstacles. While progress is visible, it still lags behind the high expectations and targeted pressure from the Chinese State. Growing economic challenges also drove China's efforts to become even more innovative. Since the turn of the millennium, financial incentives have been pushed specifically for the promotion of STI by (private) enterprises. There are thus opposing power structures that China's central government attempts to keep under control. This contradictory situation raises basic questions on market forces and innovation systems in authoritarian frameworks. This paper discusses the question of whether the case of this hybrid status quo of private public relationship in Chinese STI is doomed to fail because of its fundamental contradictions to the conventional, hitherto dominant concepts of functioning innovation systems? Or whether it is precisely these previous approaches that are being called into question because of the empirically effective persistence of other approaches? This question will be explored on the basis of the Triple Helix model, as will the discussion whether the hybrid nature of the private and political sectors in China, due to their now dominant international role also calls into question other regional systems that have functioned according to previous patterns of private science funding.