New insights to China's export-oriented clusters

In the last two decades, regional development theories based on the Western experience, highly addressed the innovation function of industrial clusters, with Chinese scholars following. However, because it not yet fit the nation's characteristics, it could not provide proper theoretical background for Chinese policy makers. The paper claims that Chinese clusters formed in global-local tension. Paying more attention to concentrated dispersion caused by offshore outsourcing could provide some insights for cluster formation of China. The clusters of China functioned very well for multinational buyers and contract manufactures, but their roles for build competitive advantage of the country and their regions were limited. Therefore, the key task facing China should be to foster innovative clusters instead of building more 'low road' ones. From these points of view, Chinese scholars should study industrial linkage continually, analyze the actual evolutions and function in the national institution setting, so that policy-makers could learn the circumstances in which local upgrading strategies could be expected to succeed.EI06839-8464