中国自主創新与信息通信技术标准

China’s policy of promoting indigenous innovation in ICT industries is bifurcated, with large-scale, capital intensive development in a few urban centers supporting the national strategy of becoming an exporter of technologies and standards, while enterprises in provincial cities and towns are left to fend for themselves with few central government subsidies or protections, writes Jane K Winn.

Photo: Jane K Winn

Since 1949, the development of the Chinese economy has largely proceeded along two different tracks: industrialized urban areas received preferential treatment, while rural areas where the majority of Chinese live at best suffered benign neglect or at worse were compelled to subsidize urban development. Even with the market reforms that began in 1978, the interests of rural provinces have generally remained subordinated to those of urban areas. Briefly during the 1980s, this pattern was reversed when growth in rural areas exploded following the reduction of compelled transfers from rural to urban areas, and the end of collectivized farming, but by the 1990s, rural development was once again lagging behind urban development.
China’s policy of promoting indigenous innovation in ICT industries is similarly bifurcated, with large-scale, capital intensive development in a few urban centers supporting the national strategy of becoming an exporter of technologies and standards, while enterprises in provincial cities and towns are left to fend for themselves with few central government subsidies or protections. The first branch of Chinese indigenous innovation & ICT standards policy has produced high-tech centers such as the Zhongguancun district in Beijing near Peking University and Tsinghua University which are making rapid progress towards global leadership. The focus of this policy is the pursuit of “primary,” “radical” or “first generation” innovation that will allow China to define global markets and reap the benefits of exporting indigenous innovation rather than continuing to pay the high cost of licensing technologies developed elsewhere. The development of the Chinese 3G standard (TD-SCDMA) falls within this branch of PRC ICT standards and indigenous innovation policy.

The majority of China’s population does not live in major urban areas such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou or Chongqing, however, and the majority of Chinese firms are still struggling to make the move from labor-intensive, low-tech industries (referred to as “extensive” development in PRC policy statements) to knowledge-intensive, high-tech industries (called “intensive” development). In 2008, tens of thousands of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) dependent on exports were allowed to fail in response to the global financial crisis, demonstrating that the central PRC government still provides little concrete support for most domestic private enterprises.

Photo: Jane K Winn

As Chinese SMEs struggle to upgrade their operations in order to remain competitive in global markets, as well as to expand into China’s growing domestic economy, they are in desperate need of “secondary,” “incremental” or “second generation” ICT innovation. Management systems generally, including management information systems, of even quite large domestic Chinese firms are often much less sophisticated than their counterparts in developed market economies. For example, the e-commerce marketplace Alibaba essentially provides advertisements for companies that join its community, but cannot yet provide a true online marketplace because most Chinese SMEs lack the capacity to engage in business-to-business e-commerce. In the ICT arena, many global technology companies including IBM, Microsoft and Google are rushing to establish SaaS (software as a service) and cloud computing services to meet the needs of the underserved domestic enterprise market in China, but these are proprietary solutions competing for market share, not standards-based solutions.

ICT standards are a strategic priority for the PRC government today, but that policy focuses on creating “national champions” that can drive competition in global markets rather than following it, not on the rationalization of more traditional sectors of the economy such as manufacturing and services. If the PRC central government were to make improvements in domestic enterprise management capability a strategic priority, then ICT standards could play a pivotal role in increasing competition and reducing the cost to Chinese enterprises to access more sophisticated business information systems.

Outside of privileged high-technology regions and enterprises being nurtured by the central government, it is unclear what role indigenous innovation will play in meeting the demand of domestic Chinese enterprises for more sophisticated information systems. While the competitive advantage that comes from controlling standards is well understood by Chinese managers (as evidenced by the widely referenced observation, “三流企业卖产品third-class firms sell products, 二流企业卖商标second-class firms market brands, 一流企业卖标准 world-class firms set standards”), there are no signs in Chinese society today of anything that corresponds to US-based ICT standards fora and consortia. This is due in part to the interest of the Chinese Communist Party in not allowing independent, private organizations, including standard developing organizations, to take root in the Chinese domestic economy if it cannot control them.