China's high-speed railway technology transfer and spill-over

Abstract

China’s High-speed Railway (HSR) technology has been rapidly developing since 2004 with the imported technologies from the foreign countries with advance HSR technologies, which made China have over 29,000km of HSR lines (i.e. two-thirds of the total length of the HSR lines in the world at the end of 2018. This dissertation firstly reviews the history of China’s HSR technology development by analyzing the patent applications in various Intellectual Property Offices (IPO) as quantitative data and the archival documents as qualitative research. This dissertation also conducts a comprehensive study to evaluate the impact of China’s HSR technology transfer and spill-over on the foreign countries and global HSR technology development by adopting the patent data in World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and under Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) between China and other countries. Based on the analyzed findings, it shows that the role of China on technology development has been changed from the beneficiary to the facilitator on the other countries’ HSR technology development in the past decade. It is therefore discovered that China’s HSR technology transfer and spill-over do bring the benefit to the foreign countries and facilitate the global HSR technology development. This dissertation also discusses the ideology of the global political economy for China’s HSR technology development. Based on the findings of this dissertation, it is observed that innovation mercantilism would not necessarily damage the global HSR technology innovation, but it could further facilitate the global innovation without expensing from the resources of various competitors via technology transfer and spill-over by the change from innovation mercantilism to liberalism.