Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 11, 2022

The Role of Government in Catching Up and Surpassing Emerging Technology Industries: A New Perspective on Industrial Policy Research

(Abstract)

He Jun

Mainstream industrial policy research cannot fully explain the relationship between government interventions and the surpassing of China’s mobile communications industry. The key to China’s breakthrough in 3G, parallel achievement in 4G, and leadership in 5G was the government’s effective industrial competition strategy of integrating with mainstream standards, prioritizing medium frequency development and so on. And the unified promotion of “technology-standards-industry” and rapid contingency decision-making has enabled the efficient implementation and dynamic optimization of the strategy. The introduction of a competitive industrial strategy perspective in our study can complement existing industrial policy research. It reveals that, on the one hand, when concerted action by a large number of innovators is important for competitive industrial performance, the effective shaping and global coordination of government strategies for industry competition can reinforce catch-up in new technology industries under certain conditions; on the other, selective industrial policies are only effective if they do not seriously undermine the market mechanism and are positively complementary to strategic factors such as competitive strategy that determine an industry’s long-term development performance.