Developing an it standard in China - What lessons can we learn from this?

Abstract

While users in the rest of the World have been offered 3G mobile phones based on either the CDMA2000 or W-CDMA standards, users in China have the additional option of using phones based on the TD-SCDMA standard. As a technology largely developed by Chinese actors and only implemented in China, TD-SCDMA has been seen as a techno-nationalist project orchestrated by the Chinese government, unequivocally supported by Chinese firms. In China, the media has also started trumpeting the success of this “indigenous innovation”. This paper adopts a science and technology studies (STS) framework, opening up the technological “black-box”, to explore how global and national institutional and social elements have been embedded in and impact on the artefacts of TD-SCDMA technology. It is concluded that rather than see TD-SCDMA as an indigenous Chinese technology, its history exemplifies how standards and the intellectual property embedded in them lead to a complex hybridization between the global and national sectoral systems of innovation.