The Inside Story of China's High-Tech Industry

Making Silicon Valley in Beijing

By (author) Yu Zhou

Publication date:

24 December 2007

Length of book:

214 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780742555792

In the 1980s, China faced the monumental task of creating, from scratch, internationally competitive companies. This challenge was especially daunting in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. The Inside Story of China's High-Tech Industry describes the emergence and growth of this industry in China through a historically situated analysis of China's leading science park, Beijing's Zhongguancun, also known as China's Silicon Valley. Zhou challenges the prevailing view that foreign multinational corporations and exports are the driving forces for technological progress in less developed countries by arguing that, in the case of China, it is the conjunction of domestic and export markets that has provided the main impetus to technological learning and the development of industry competitiveness. This is the best treatment to date of China's most important innovation region. It will be useful for scholars and students in the fields of economics, regional sciences, geography, planning, sociology, information technology, and business management, as well as for anyone interested in the rise of China and global technological development.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Making Silicon Valley in China: Zhongguancun
Chapter 2: From Offspring to Rebel: The Birth of ZGC and the Transformation of China's Science and Technology Establishments, 1950s–1980s
Chapter 3: Foreign "Wolf" and Local "Lamb": Multinational Companies and Resurgence of ZGC in the 1990s
Chapter 4: The Internet and the Restructuring of ZGC, 1998–2003
Chapter 5: The Anatomy of ZGC: The Domestic Companies
Chapter 6: The Dynamics of Internationalization in ZGC
Chapter 7: Grassroots Transnationals: Returnee Entrepreneurs
Chapter 8: China's Technical Standard Strategies: Toward an Alternative Path
Conclusion
References

The Inside Story of China's High-Tech Industry is a richly illuminating piece of scholarship that offers an interesting new perspective on the development of Beijing's Zhongguancun high-technology district and the implications of Zhongguancun's path for China's future technological and economic development. . . . Zhou impressively captures much of the policy, structural and even geographic change that has occurred in Zhongguancun over the past three decades. . . . Valuable and impressive.