Like other East Asian countries, China has been undergoing a process of liberalization and of opening to the world economy. During the past twenty years, economic reforms have slowly moved the country as a whole toward a more open, more market-oriented economy, and science and technology (S&T) policies and institutions have been reformed in a similar spirit. Policy makers gradually dismantled a highly centralized and hierarchical model of technological innovation and began replacing it with a more flexible and “bottom-up” system. Leaders at all levels have moved away from a research and development system dominated by central planning and state-owned enterprises to one that increasingly relies on individual innovation and entrepreneurship, while foreign direct investment (FDI) and multinational corporations both play larger roles in Chinese development plans. The openness to a diversity of actors crucially includes both outside actors — multinational corporations (MNCs) — and domestic non-state-owned corporations. China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) promises to consolidate these trends.

At first glance then, China seems to be part of a larger project of the recasting of technology policy within the region. But ironically, in recent years, China's policy has also evolved in ways that bring it closer to technonationalism, at least in some senses of the word.