A Surprising Roadmap: How US Tech Blockades Sparked a Scientific Pivot in Chinese Firms
Technology can be blocked, but somehow science finds a way. When external tech procurement and licensing hit a wall, affected Chinese firms map out a new path of innovation.
A recent study published in Science, co-authored by Prof. Junhan Wang (Shenzhen University), Prof. Xibao Li (Tsinghua University), and Prof. Yanbo Wang (HKU Business School), reveals how firms on the US Entity List adapt. Analysing 12 years of firm-level data, the researchers find targeted companies leverage public science to decode core principles, accelerating China’s rise as a global scientific knowledge producer.
What’s New?
- Sanctions as unintended catalysts: Entity List restrictions triggered a 72.3% surge in domestic patents citing scientific literature in sanctioned Chinese firms;
- A borderless search: Instead of retreating to domestic science, sanctioned firms broadened their scope by actively expanding citations across non-US foreign, and even US, academic research; and
- From consumers to producers: boosted by close industry-academia-research collaboration, companies stopped just reading science literature and started publishing it, with double-digit growth in research output.
While Chinese firms still lag behind their US peers in scientific breadth and depth, read the full study to discover what this significant pivot means to the global innovation ecosystem.
Read the article written by Prof. Yanbo Wang (Chinese Only): Click Here
Read the full article: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aed7991
