Rethinking China and Innovation

Join the Department of Social Sciences for this Great Problems, Great Minds seminar series event featuring guest speaker Yu Zhou, a geography professor at Vassar College.

China’s ambition, strategies, and progress in innovation have been front and center in the controversies of trade wars, global technology, and US-China relations. This lecture reports on the ongoing research in Chinese innovation models by tracking the evolution of several critical high-tech industrial sectors in state policies, investments, market demands, and technological development. It reveals that Chinese innovation models are diverse across industries and enterprises and fluid over time. Zhou argues that it is important to understand China's pursuit of technology from its shifting priorities, strengths, and weaknesses, rather than only through the lens of great power competition.