Contemporary Asia in the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. xx, 282 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-231-15331-7.
Today it is widely known that China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by volume, mainly due to the continued dominance of fossil fuels in energy production. In fact, the country’s energy sector is the largest single source of climate-warming emissions globally. In Green Innovation in China, the result of nine years research, Joanna Lewis takes as her focus a low-carbon power source that has seen unprecedented growth in China and is therefore of crucial importance: wind energy. The country now has the biggest wind power market in the world, its installed capacity having increased over a hundredfold from 2000 to 2010 (1).
China now builds almost all of its wind turbines at home. It therefore offers not only an example of a transition from carbon-intensive growth towards low-carbon economic development, underpinned by China’s domestic policies and reflected to varying extents in its changing position in the United Nations climate-change negotiations—an important context that Lewis outlines clearly in the book’s second chapter—but also valuable insights into the process of innovation in energy, particularly for relative latecomers, and the government and business strategies that have underpinned this: from technology transfer and diffusion, to networks of learning, the emergence of Chinese green energy leaders, and, ultimately, to technological leapfrogging.
To better understand China’s place in the wind power innovation system as it has developed around the world, Lewis’s third chapter explores the national and multinational networks of public and private institutions that have funded and supported innovative activity in this sector, with a particular focus on China’s national innovation system and the laws, Five-Year Plans, scientific institutions, and mechanisms for government support that have sustained it through the period of China’s ongoing and evolving market reforms. This includes discussions of China’s absorptive capacity, incentives and decisions around localization of manufacturing, and the barriers posed by factors as diverse as tariffs, gaps in indigenous technical capacity, and failings in quality control.
Lewis’s fourth chapter focuses on the role of foreign technology. The author discusses the early decisions taken by international turbine manufacturers in engaging with China, including Denmark’s Vestas, Spain’s Gamesa, Germany’s Nordex and the United States’ GE, by pursuing joint ventures or localizing production to meet local content requirements. These detailed profiles illustrate the changing policy environment for foreign firms in the era of reform and opening up, and the diverse ways in which technology transfer to China was achieved in this context, from mergers and movements of employees, to licensing and collaborations with China’s universities and research institutes. This brings the reader up to the environment of today, in which foreign companies face not only price competition in China, but also a policy environment that assists research, development, and deployment in its domestic wind industry “in a manner not unlike that of Denmark and the United States in the 1980s” (113), at a time when government support in industrialized countries has waned.
This is particularly important, since the successful results of this sustained government support are evident in Lewis’s fifth chapter, which focuses on Goldwind, China’s “first leading wind turbine manufacturer” (121), a partially state-owned company which had designed one-fifth of wind turbines installed in China by the end of 2010. Goldwind also managed to increase its total R&D investments annually—receiving funds not only from the Chinese government but also international investors, such as the World Bank—developing its own, successful turbine designs. Lewis notes here that domestic wind deployment has suffered delays in connecting to the grid and political barriers to wind integration remain. Given its prominence in debates around renewables in China, it is surprising that this problem of so-called “abandoned wind,” the local implementation gap it exposes, and the fragmented, elite politics that it touches on are not given greater attention in the book.
The process of leapfrogging in wind energy, however, is given close and well-deserved attention in the sixth chapter, with China, South Korea, and India—all late entrants to the global wind power industry—seen using different strategies to foster the development of their own domestic manufacturing firms, in terms of technology transfer and acquisition strategies, domestic policy environments and integration with global learning networks. Leading Indian firm Suzlon, for example, is seen to have pursued an internationally based R&D and manufacturing strategy from the outset, while Goldwind kept an exclusive focus on the Chinese market, with little R&D or manufacturing outside.
Lewis’s final chapter, on the prospects and politics of engaging China on clean energy cooperation, makes clear the contrast between China’s role as developing country in multilateral climate change talks and its increasing ambition when acting bilaterally: so far as to be seen to act as a “superpower” (169) in the context of US-China climate cooperation. This observation proved prescient, given the importance of 2014’s joint US-China announcement on emissions reductions (after Lewis’s book went to press). Her concluding recommendations in this chapter—to expand US-China collaboration on clean energy—also resonate with the details of that agreement.
That political dimension, however, suggests how understanding the prospects for wind energy in China should also include the political and social dimensions of innovation, aspects that technology-focused approaches do not emphasize. There is room for greater attention, for example, to the perspectives, priorities, and practices of China’s provincial and county-level governments, individual entrepreneurs, grid operators, or electricity users themselves. Green Innovation in China is important nonetheless: an accurate and invaluable reference for scholars of development and innovation studies, which while commendably empirically focused, should inform theoretical conversations around diverse global approaches to green transformations, seen in Hubert Schmitz’s How does the Global Power Shift Affect the Low Carbon Transformation? (IDS, 2014), and the dynamic role of government in driving innovation, as discussed in Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State (Anthem, 2013).
Sam Geall
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
pp. 417-419