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This discussion paper intends to describe the current status of the Chinese science and innovation system - mainly on the national level - as well as the developments of the past about 10 years that led to this current status.

This discussion paper addresses policy learning and policy implementation in China since about 2006. In particular, the potential change of research and innovation policy under Xi Jinping is discussed, as well as core policies and strategies to further improve the Chinese innovation system and to shift it from a low-cost to an innovation-driven economy. The Internet Plus strategy and Made in China 2025 (MIC2025) as the most well-known policies that support the overall and most central "Innovation Driven Devel-opment Strategy" are briefly introduced. A first section, however, discusses policy-making processes and policy learning processes in China in general. It tries to sketch the current debate in the scientific literature, if the reform era ended and if the new au-thoritarianism under Xi Jinping is hampering policy implementation and policy learning as well as the future economic development.

China is the fastest growing car market in the world. Both, government and industry alike have high hopes for the paradigm shift in mobility towards electric cars. China's industry might be able to catch up or leap-frog, once electric cars have hit the roads. Taking the question if and how paradigm shifts occur as a starting point, this paper describes and assesses the current policies in electro mobility in China and puts them in relation to China's scientific and technological capabilities. The results show that a huge amount of public funding is involved, though spread over many programs and too many provinces. Though the scientific capabilities seem to be very promising, the tech-nological capabilities - applying science to real-world issues - seem to lag behind. These findings let us conclude that the leap-frogging in mobility might not occur in the way the most optimistic spectators might want to see.

[Introduction .] This paper describes the current STI policies of the Sino-German collaboration from a German perspective. It starts with the policies and the actions on the governmental level. Section three tries to briefly depict the effective implementation and the outcomes of these policies and individual actions. It uses empirical data to describe the current status and the evolution of the Sino-German exchange in science, technology and in-novation. Scientific publications and especially co-publications provide a sketch of the science collaborations. Patents and co-patents offer an indication of the technology collaboration as well as an assessment of the attractiveness of the (technology) markets. Finally, foreign trade data also offers a view on the industrial exchange. Profiles in all three dimensions convey a broad picture of complementarities and competition between China and Germany. Section four discusses and summarizes the findings.

In this study, we compared the profile of German Transnational Patents with the patenting profiles of other countries from several different angles. Germany is a stronghold in international patenting in terms of the absolute number of filings (ranked the third only after the United States and Japan) and the number of filings per employee (ranked the fourth after Swiss, Sweden, and Finland). However, its growth rate is lower than the top-patenting countries and even below the EU average. This indicates that comparative technological advantage of Germany may be debilitated in the future. In order to revamp technological advantage of Germany, tracking the situation of fast-growing countries such as Korea and China would help. Probably more serious problem for German innovative capabilities is its weakness in fast-growing, technology-intensive industries such as ICT and biopharmaceuticals. While Germany is very strong in patenting in moderately technology-intensive sectors such as machinery and automobile, its technological presence in terms of international patent filings are very weak in Electronics, ICT, and biopharmaceuticals. Moreover, patent filings from small and medium-sized enterprises in these sectors are much weaker. As a remedy to this problem, international collaboration can be a candidate solution. We showed that international co-invention occurs more frequently in the weaker technology areas. This indirectly indicates that international collaboration would help a country to strengthen its currently weak technological capability. International co-invention has been growing faster than the growth of patenting. Also, in rapidly-growing fields such as chemistry and electronics, international co-invention is more frequently observed. Therefore, policy instruments that can promote international research collaboration and attract multinational companies in these growing fields to build their research centres in Germany would help Germany advance into a major technology player in these fields. In addition, to bolster technological capabilities of small and medium-sized enterprises in these growing, technology-intensive sectors, promoting interorganizational technology transfer, especially from universities, and institutionalizing venture capital would be essential.