China’s economy is growing quickly. It will be innovation-led. Europe can relate to China through R&D programmes, which offer an alternative vehicle of engagement to the traditional political and economic approaches.

This book promotes an awareness of the dynamics of innovation in China. It looks at Europe’s cosy, cloistered microcosms of science and technology, and contends that the ‘rules for survival’ in R&D and education are changing.  We write that S&T in China is gaining quickly on the West in terms of base R&D parameters such as expenditure, scientists trained, papers published and patents awarded, and that European R&D is in the process of stalling.

China is in the process of rapidly developing a technology based economy; an economy which will be led by innovation and driven by R&D, and which will take Chinese technology from ‘copy mode to create mode’ within a decade.  

All the base elements of China’s Science and Technology  infrastructure are already in  place and functioning, including a powerful and comprehensive national plan, organised administrative structures, effective funding mechanisms, internationally trained scientists, and state-of-the art R&D projects and programmes. 

Using energy-flow concepts from von Bertalanffy (1968) and Chomsky (1965) we trace a narrow sinusoidal-type pathway across the face of the earth, which picks up the epicentres of most of the great historical empires of Western Civilisation, and about 90% of the headquarters or nerves centres of current Fortune 500 companies, where most big business finance and S&T decisions are taken.  The pathway also collaterally picks up many of the worlds main R&D clusters and centres in the Triad (Europe, America, Japan) and in China and India.

Harmony is a key theme of the book; harmony with nature and harmony among people and between nations.  The book suggests options for R&D connectivity  with China through longitudinal research projects and ‘carrousel-exchanges’ in environment and health related fields. The FP7 has scope for new funding instruments and practices relating to EU-China joint ventures.

The book offers no simple and sovereign solutions to the myriad of complexities or the involuted socio-economic issues facing the future of science, technology and innovation, but it does profess that there can be conceptually simple, elegant approaches to what appear to be complex issues.

Innovation in China will appeal to a wide range of people interested in global issues, in Asian history, in China today and the process of innovation. The book is written to be provocative; to challenge traditional thinking of how Europe S&T fares and how Europe might best relate to China.  It implores engagement, debate and dialogue.