Sharing Foreign Technology

This book analyzes China’s foreign technology acquisition activity and how this has helped its rapid rise to superpower status. Since 1949, China has operated a vast and unique system of foreign technology spotting and transfer aimed at accelerating civilian and military development, reducing the cost of basic research, and shoring up its power domestically and abroad—without running the political risks borne by liberal societies as a basis for their creative developments. While discounted in some circles as derivative and consigned to perpetual catch-up mode, China’s "hybrid" system of legal, illegal, and extralegal import of foreign technology, combined with its indigenous efforts, is, the authors believe, enormously effective and must be taken seriously. Accordingly, in this volume, 17 international specialists combine their scholarship to portray the system’s structure and functioning in heretofore unseen detail, using primary Chinese sources to demonstrate the perniciousness of the problem in a manner not likely to be controverted. The book concludes with a series of recommendations culled from the authors’ interactions with experts worldwide. This book will be of much interest to students of Chinese politics, US foreign policy, intelligence studies, science and technology studies, and International Relations in general.

Foreign subsidiaries of multinational companies are suggested as one of the main channels of technology transfer to less developed economies. In Central East Europe their presence proved to be a decisive factor to economic restructuring and development. This volume is a unique guide to theory, method of research, and empirical evidence, for technology transfer via foreign subsidiaries of multinational companies. It combines the merits of a core text on technology transfer via FDI with up-to-date empirical evidence.

How does the preferred entry mode of foreign investors depend upon their technological capability relative to that of their rivals? This paper develops a simple duopoly model of mode choice and evaluates its main testable implication using data on foreign investors in Eastern European countries and the successor states of the Soviet Union. The theoretical model captures the following intuitive trade-off: while a joint venture (JV) can help a foreign investor secure a better position in the product market vis-a-vis its rival, it also requires that profits be shared with the local partner. The model predicts that the efficient foreign investor is less likely to choose a JV and more likely to enter directly. Our empirical analysis supports this prediction: foreign investors with more sophisticated technologies and marketing skills (relative to other firms in their industry) tend to prefer direct entry to joint ventures. This empirical finding is robust to controlling for host country specific effects and other commonly cited determinants of entry mode.