Plenty of brain power
"Maximilian von Zedtwitz, a professor of management at Tsinghua University, estimates that China had as many as 300 foreign R&D centres, most founded in the past three years.
Chinese officials say that it's hard to say exactly how many international companies have R&D centres in China, but a Commerce Ministry official recently said that there were 600 labs.
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The starting point for this research boom was China's growing sophistication as a technology market, especially in telecommunications and the Internet, industry executives said.
Recently, the American software company Oracle opened a lab in Beijing. It wants to tailor its Linux operating software, a rival of Windows, to its Asian customers. Companies like Motorola, Siemens, IBM and Intel are also at work, running full-scale labs that work on their companies' most advanced products.
These labs vary in size and ambition, but as they expand they may help transform China's R&D power. It's primarily now a user-copier of advanced technology developed elsewhere, but experts have said it could develop into something else.
"The Chinese are going to become a source of innovation," said Denis Simon, an expert on Chinese science and technology who is head of the State University of New York's Levin Institute. Industry experts have said that some foreign headquarters give the Chinese labs less pressure to develop products for direct application. Although this means some freedom for Chinese scientists, there is some concern that it gives them less chance to touch the core technology.
Liu Shian is a senior researcher at Canadian network equipment producer Nortel Networks' Beijing R&D centre. The work he and his colleagues are doing mostly involves maintenance and adding features to a developed product.
"We cannot access the core technology for most of the time. There is no reason for labs to train people to be hot-technology experts. They just need some guy to finish the project. We'll have to develop core technology by ourselves," Liu said.
And, it is far from certain that China will reap the full rewards of this technological flowering, some experts have said. Nurturing corporate labs is a delicate business. In China, they have concerns about protecting patents, retaining and training researchers, and managing the distances, physical and cultural between China and the head offices elsewhere.
The most immediate threat has been China's weak protection of intellectual property rights, said von Zedtwitz, the Tsinghua professor.
And, turning China into a research engine will take time, waiting for the number of experienced scientists to grow.
"The technology and science are not as easy as PC-DIY [do-it-yourself, putting together a computer]. The Japanese took 150 years catching up with the West," Liu, the Nortel Networks researcher said."
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