A romance of the three kingdoms and the tale of two cities: the role and position of the biotechnology industry cluster in Guangdong province, China

Abstract

The Guangdong Province has been at the forefront of export-based economic de-velopment in China. Due to rising labor and environmental costs continuing in this path is becoming unsustainable. Guangdong embarked on a two-prong strategy: (1) relocate low cost manufacturing from coastal regions inland and (2) upgrade the industrial structure in the coastal Pearl River Delta by developing clusters for innovating activities in high-tech fields such as biotechnology (BT). BT activities in Guangdong are clustered in and around the capital Guangzhou and the new industrial city Shenzhen. The paper aims at answering the following questions: (1) How does the Guang-dong BT cluster compare with the two better known ones in Beijing and Shanghai? Does the BT science and academic infrastructure in Guangdong create conditions for a sus-tained innovation-based growth of BT industry? (2) Does the emergence and evolution of the two Guangdong bio-regions in Guangzhou and Shenzhen conform to Orsenigo’s the-oretical hypothesis that “innovation generates clusters at least as clusters create innova-tion”? (3) How does the government controlled and supported emergence and evolution of Chinese BT clusters compare with the theoretical interpretation of clustering in the West. (4) Is high-tech biotechnology in Guangdong becoming one of the significant high-tech/high value-added alternatives to traditional labor-intensive export industries? To respond these questions we rely on Chinese official statistics and other sources comple-mented by findings of the survey of about fifty BT firms and research institutes in Guangdong province.