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Paper Tigers, Hidden Dragons: Firms and the Political Economy of China's Technological Development Douglas B. Fuller Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press , 2016 x + 279 pp. £55.00 ISBN 978-0-19-877720-5
Book Reviews
In this well-researched book, Douglas Fuller engages in three debates. From the perspective of China studies, Paper Tigers, Hidden Dragons sets out to explain China's path of development in the face of weak domestic market institutions and the future prospects of China's direction. Theoretically, advancing beyond the state vs. market debate on the political economy of development and the literature on comparative institutions, Fuller contends that globalization could be an alternative, and he specifies the conditions under which foreign institutions could be conducive to China's technological development.
Fuller forcefully argues that post-socialist transformation could benefit from globalization in situations in which specific kinds of foreign entrepreneurship, namely, the ethnic Chinese foreign-invested enterprises he terms "hybrids," opt for China-based operational strategies and import foreign financial institutions, sowing seeds in China's technological development, as demonstrated in the information technology (IT) sector. Here, the hybrids take advantage of the best from both worlds by tapping into global capital through the financial institutions of the advanced countries (such as foreign venture capital) and a strategically China-based operational strategy that locates their core corporate activities in China. The China-based operational strategy differentiates the ethnic Chinese foreign-invested firms from foreign multinationals (MNCs), thus making them "hidden dragons." Global capital is important as it solves the recurring problems of market failure in developing countries as well as government failures in a dysfunctional Chinese financial...