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We conduct a 3-y study involving 11,662 respondents to map cultural tightness—the degree to which a society is characterized by rules and norms and the extent to which people are punished or sanctioned when they deviate from these rules and norms—across 31 provinces in China. Consistent with prior research, we find that culturally tight provinces are associated with increased governmental control, constraints in daily life, religious practices, and exposure to threats. Departing from previous findings that tighter states are more rural, conservative, less creative, and less happy, cultural tightness in China is associated with urbanization, economic growth, better health, greater tolerance toward the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community, and gender equality. Further, analyzing about 3.85 million granted patents in China (1990–2013), we find that provinces with tighter cultures have lower rates of substantive/radical innovations yet higher rates of incremental innovations; individuals from culturally tighter provinces reported higher levels of experienced happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can China catch-up with the United States technologically by mobilizing its bureaucracy and assigning ambitious targets to local governments? We analyzed an original dataset of 4.6 million patents filed in China from 1990 through 2014 and paired this with a new, rigorous measure of patent novelty that approximates the quality of innovation. In 2006, China's central government launched a national campaign to promote indigenous innovation and introduced bureaucratic targets for patents. Our analysis finds evidence that these targets, combined with political competition, pushed local governments to "game the numbers" by channeling relatively more effort toward boosting non-novel—possibly junk—patents over novel patents. Nationally, this is reflected in a surge of aggregate patents paired with a falling ratio of novel patents. China's innovation drive is susceptible to manipulation and waste—it is enormous in scale but low in productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of China's comprehensive patent data, which was provided to the researchers by the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of China. The focus of the analysis is to gain a better understanding of the elements of China's innovations in science and technology. Topics include an overview of the central role that patents play in empirical research on innovation and the difficulty in understanding the technological development of China and East Asian countries as a result of patent limitations by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and what prompted the increase in China's patent applications, including the growth of China's private and domestic sectors and weak intellectual property (IP) regulations.