Hierarchien im chinesischen Wissenschafts- und Technologiesystem — Systemreformen und ihre Auswirkungen auf Wissensflüsse

The Chinese science and technology system has been fundamentally reformed in recent years. Within a short time frame of core reforms around the turn of the millennium, the university landscape changed completely. The increasingly international orientation of top Chinese universities and their intense collaboration with their global counterparts have led to an upgrading of the domestic knowledge base. Processes of knowledge diffusion emerge in such a hierarchical system of differently performing universities, linking the local to the global system, and eventually upvalue the Chinese innovation system. This development will be traced with an analysis of co-authorship networks. It is shown that the group of top Chinese universities is becoming increasingly dominant in the network over time. However, there are differences in the utilization of the top universities' function as gatekeepers mediating between the local and the global levels, especially since the top league universities tend to circulate knowledge amongst themselves. The gradual improvement in the access of the less-distinguished universities to global knowledge is therefore merely an effect of improved network topologies. The deliberate creation of a hierarchy with the establishment of strong national universities would thus result in an overall improvement in the science system. This finding is also relevant to other developing countries with constraints in their resources and funding.