Regulation and Governance of Nanotechnology in China: Regulatory Challenges and Effectiveness
Abstract
China’s rapid economic transformation over the last 3 decades has been remarkable both in terms of its speed and scale. As the Economist magazine reported recently, ‘In China each person now produces four times as much as in the early 1970s’ with as many as 400 million people being lifted from abject poverty into the ranks of an urban dwelling middle class in the space of a single generation (Economist, 2007). Much of this transformation has been off the back of China’s movement into low value adding manufacturing, in essence becoming the world’s assembly, manufacturing, textile, and footwear hub. China, however, is rapidly moving to reposition itself and climb up the value China, announcing its ambition to become a global leader in science and technology. This paper explores one such facet of this race for global leadership in science and technology, addressing China’s massive investment in nanotechnology research and attempts to become a leading producer of nano-materials and nano-science knowledge hub. As the paper highlights, however, science and technology innovation are underpinned by regulatory and institutional technologies, and require adroit policy supervision of complex innovation eco-systems. Whether China is able to leverage off its increasing wealth and funnel this into global leadership in science and technology, in large measure depends on still nascent regulatory systems.Published
Issue
Section
License
EJLT is an open access journal, aiming to disseminate academic work and perspectives as widely as possible to the benefit of the author and the author’s readers. It is the assumption of the EJLT that authors who publish in the journal wish their work to be available as freely and as widely as possible through the open access publishing channel.
Authors who publish with EJLT will retain copyright and moral rights in the underlying work but will grant all users the rights to copy, store and print for non-commercial use copies of their work. Commercial mirroring may also be carried out with the consent of the journal. The work must remain as published – without redaction or editing – and must clearly state the identity of the author and the originating EJLT url of the article. Any commercial use of the author’s work - apart from mirroring - requires the permission of the author and any aspects of the article which are the property of EJLT (e.g. typographical format) requires permission from EJLT.
Authors can sometimes become no longer contactable (through, for example, death or retirement). If this occurs, any rights in the work will pass to the European Journal of Law and Technology which will continue to make the work available in as wide a manner as possible to achieve the aims of open access and ensuring that an author's work continues to be available. An author - or their estate - can recover these rights from EJLT by providing contact information.
The European Journal of Law and Technology holds rights in format, publication and dissemination.
EJLT, as a non-commercial organisation - which receives donations to allow it to continue publishing – must retain information on reader access to journal articles. This means that we will not give permission to mirror the journal unless we can be provided with full details as to reader access to each and every journal article. We prefer and encourage deep linking rather than mirroring. Encouragement is thus given for all users – commercial and non-commercial – to provide indexes and links to articles in the EJLT where the index or link points to the location of the article on the EJLT server, rather than to stored copies on other servers.
Please contact the European Journal of Law and Technology if you are in any doubt as to what this statement of use covers.