China’s New Alliance Capitalism and the Case of the Wireless Communication Sector

Abstract

This thesis seeks to explore how key 'ecological' or 'systems integration' technical pressures such as the co-production of technology, the emergence of new "collaborative intellectual property (IP) mechanisms", and the increasing use of collaborative alliances for market and product development are impacting on and shaping the socio-technical policy directives of Chinese state leaders and the strategic behaviour of key Chinese high-technology firms operating in the global wireless sector.The central theoretical focus of this thesis is the emergence of alliance capitalism as an important new form of economic organisation with specific theoretical focus on the role of governmental authorities in both facilitating and governing the parameters of global technological alliances and market construction. The value of this thesis is that it highlights how the government of China and its domestic firms have recently adjusted to socio-technological systems change and the changing nature of the global technological environment and revised their technological development strategies to incorporate the notion of alliance capitalism. It will highlight how alliance capitalism is built around reciprocal interdependence and signifies a fundamental shift in the organisational behaviour of the Chinese government and its domestic firms. Beyond China's earlier FDI and techno-nationalist strategies, this new development strategy can be seen as the third major attempt to mount an effective industrial strategy in China. Specifically, it responds to socio-technological systems change in a way that seeks to reconcile the New Left's techno-nationalistic ambition to build an indigenous technology base characterised by the creation and ownership of technological standards and proprietorial ideas with the liberal desire to utilise the contemporary globalisation process as a mechanism to facilitate economic growth and technological up-scaling. It is essentially a third way whereby the state's strategic control over the globalisation process is modified in a way that still allows it a certain degree of control over the developmental process itself, but in which the existence of critical globalised ecosystem dependencies and the interests of global firms are actually integrated into the Chinese developmental strategy.ii