Chinese Telecommunications Policy

Based on firsthand information obtained from interviews with senior figures in the Chinese telecommunications industry, this book presents a unique review and analysis of the evolution of Chinese telecommunications policy. It analyses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing new entrants, issues of ownership and interconnection, the broad economic background of 3G licensing, and the significant implications of China's accession to the WTO. These are fully analyzed within the context of the unfolding Chinese regulatory system.

Openness and competition sparked major advances in Chinese industry. Recent policy reversals emphasizing indigenous innovation seem likely to disappoint.

Analyses China's telecommunications sector and policy and examines how it fits into China's economic and political reform process.

This book explains the history, current situation, market size and technological level of China's telecommunication industry in detail. It also provides an introduction to the main operators in China and their respective market shares and network technologies. Information about major equipment manufacturing enterprises and their major products is also provided, and their competitive strengths are analyzed. Finally, the book describes the evolution of China's telecommunication regulatory regime, the changes in telecommunication policies and the reform of regulatory practices. The impact of these reform measures is then briefly evaluated.

In the early 1990s, China started to reform its telecommunications regime by removing barriers to foreign and private investment and encouraging competition. This text applies the "Public Choice Plus" theory (developed in the study of economics) to the analysis of the policymaking process of China's telecommunications reforms. Guan is a senior fellow at the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the U. of Toronto.

Communications and Information in China is a focused analysis of the four fundamentals of the Chinese communications and information sector: dynamic landscape, which includes, most importantly, status, trends, directions, initiatives and characteristics of the Chinese IT and communications industries; policy and regulatory framework, which represents a very hard-to-understand mish-mash of the Chinese political and regulatory structure that has significant impact on where, how and what Chinese IT related industries are heading to; ten most crucial regulatory and strategic issues that derive from China's domestic, political, economic and technological realities and controversies; and foreign involvement, which covers high stakes, critical challenges and contextual forces that international companies face. In-depth discussion also digs into what implications China's telecommunications industry reform and its WTO accession will have on foreign players who are involved in China's enormous but complex IT and communications market.

Expanding on the relationship between telecommunications and development, this work concentrates on the link between telecommunications and economic growth. China's telecoms and their bearing on the country's development are used as an example to further consider this relationship.

This volume is a theoretically informed comparative analysis of the telecommunications and information policy-making process in two major developing economies, China and India. With a focus on how policies are made rather than what those policies are, the book investigates how policy actors interact within institutional structures to define policy problems and identify potential solutions. The authors explain the evolution of these policy-making systems as the two countries liberalized their economies and opened their media and telecommunications systems to competition over the past two-and-a-half decades. With applications in numerous international contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in public policy studies, telecommunications, business, development economics, political science, Asian studies, and public administration.