Toward Technological Statecraft: Revisiting Beijing’s Economic Statecraft in the 1980s

The book Beijing’s Economic Statecraft during the Cold War (2014) by Shu Guang Zhang treated the years from 1979 to 1989 as a new stage in China’s economic statecraft. With Deng Xiaoping’s vigorous push for Reform and Opening Up, as well as rapprochement with the West, Beijing reoriented its economic exchanges with the Western world. Its Opening Up to Western goods, capital, and technology accorded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) not only unprecedented economic opportunities but invariably strategic potentials that would prove instrumental to its pursuit of foreign policy objectives on the course to becoming a great power. Revisiting earlier findings and exploring new material on this dynamic period of the 1980s, it is both interesting and important to examine specifically how the role of science and technology (S&T) played out in the evolution of China’s economic statecraft toward the end of the twentieth century, thereby to constitute Beijing’s technological statecraft.