China’s Technology and Growth Strategy: Focus on the Electronics Industry

Professor Barry Naughton (University of California, San Diego)

Topic

China’s technology drive is well established, as is the technological competition with the United States. Government measures and countermeasures are sharpest in the electronics industry. The recently published 14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025) commits Beijing to seeking “science and technology self-sufficiency” for the first time. An intensive program of supply chain audit and investment has been launched, and the commitment to “new infrastructure” investment as a key driver of growth and technology upgrading has been strengthened. These policy
changes affect all sectors, but have their most direct impact—and have induced the strongest response from the United States—in the electronics industry.

Biography

Barry Naughton is the So Kwan Lok Chair and Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), University of California, San Diego. Naughton’s work on the Chinese economy focuses on market transition; industry and technology; foreign trade; and political economy. His first book, Growing Out of the Plan , won the Ohira Prize in 1996, and a new edition of his popular survey and textbook, The Chinese Economy: Adaptation and Growth , appeared in 2018. Naughton did his dissertation research in China in 1982, and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1986.

Naughton was a Visiting Scholar at the Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management in the Fall of 2012 and again in the Fall of 2013. He wrote quarterly commentary on the Chinese economy for the Chinese Leadership Monitor (Hoover Institution) from 2002 until 2018. He is currently coordinator of GPS’s new MCEPA Program (Master’s in Chinese Economic and Political Affairs), and recently published a book on The Rise of China's Industrial Policy, 1978 to 2020 .

Organiser: SOAS China Institute

Contact email: sci@soas.ac.uk