Many studies raise doubts about the effectiveness of the institutions, programmes and instruments that shape the Chinese national innovation system. This article scrutinizes central–local interactions in the national Torch Programme that has governed a large group of high-technology zones since 1988. The Torch Programme's procedural practices challenge widely shared assumptions about the dirigiste character of Chinese innovation policy. It combines centralized definition of programme objectives with extensive local implementation experiments. As three case studies demonstrate, bottom-up policy innovations are effectively fed back into national programme adjustments and into horizontal policy diffusion. The array of organizational patterns and promotional instruments that emerges from competitive “experimentation under the shadow of hierarchy” (ESH) goes way beyond what could have been initiated from top down. We hypothesize that the procedural strengths displayed in the Torch Programme may provide better indicators of future innovative potential in China's high-technology zones than retrospective statistical indices and benchmarks that are derived from OECD experience.