John Minnich

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268 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

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Unhedged · The Economics Show: China wanted western tech. Now, the tables have turned. · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

It was really after Deng Xiaoping's southern tour.

This is a famous trip that Deng Xiaoping makes to Shenzhen and other special economic zones in the south of China in 1992.

And that really reignites the momentum behind reform and opening in the 1990s.

And it's at that time that we see the emergence of this quasi-official strategy that the Chinese refer to as trading the market for technology.

That's when this becomes a centerpiece of the sort of broader developmental agenda.

And so at the beginning of the 1990s, Chinese officials were really excited about the possibilities as they're opening up their market more broadly to foreign direct investment that they'll be able to

capture some of this technology that's being brought in via these joint venture policies.

But as it turned out, in the 1990s, these policies had relatively limited efficacy.

And a big part of that was, one, the Chinese state was basically a mess.

You'd had a decade of devolution of administrative and fiscal authority to local governments.

And that created a situation where the central government found it very difficult to actually enforce its technology transfer priorities properly.

vis-a-vis local governments.

So the 1980s, 1990s was a kind of early experimental phase thinking about how to do this trading the market for technology practice.

But as of the 1990s, these policies were still very much in their infancy and we hadn't really seen them fully come to form.

What changes in the post-WTO period is that at least formally China committed as part of its accession agreement to the WTO no longer to require technology transfer as a condition of market access.

But what in fact we see is not an ending of the trading the market for technology strategy of the 1990s.

but actually an evolution of that strategy.

And the evolution is defined by the fact that by the mid-2000s, you have the emergence of what we now call the indigenous innovation industrial policy paradigm.

This policy really puts this concept of indigenous innovation, domestically derived innovation, at the heart of China's broader innovation strategy.

The goal was how can we move beyond some of the perceived failures of the trading the market for technology strategy of the 1990s where you had SOEs that use these policies as a form of rent seeking, et cetera, et cetera.

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