The Subaltern Innovates: Shanzhai Mobile Phones, South-South Trade, and Counter-Narratives of Intellectual Property Rights.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The rise of emerging markets in recent years is reshaping the landscape of the global knowledge economy, with changing trade dynamics that challenge the existing norms, organization, and regulation of innovation. In theoretical terms, actors in the global South engaged in the global knowledge economy remain under-researched. In terms of policy, institutions of innovation capability building need to be (re)configured to cater to the shifting trade dynamics. The success of Chinese-made, affordable mobile phones serves as a good example that showcases new opportunities and challenges arising from burgeoning South-South trade, with implications for inclusive development. To date, Chinese mobile phone companies account for more than half of the market share in Africa, South and Southeast Asia. Most of the now well-known Chinese mobile phone companies however have emerged from a shady past of making counterfeit and knockoff mobile phones known as shanzhai phones.This dissertation investigates the knowledge economy in the developing world by analyzing the production and innovation networks of shanzhai mobile phones. Shanzhai, conventionally known as equivalent to counterfeits and knockoffs, has become an innovation model with commercial successes in the developing world. Bringing together the literatures on economic geography, regional and international development, and technology and innovation studies, this dissertation investigates production networks, formal and informal knowledge linkages, and multi-level regulatory institutions of China’s mobile phone industry. Based on a one-year fieldwork conducted in Shenzhen and the broader Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, a total of 76 interviews have been conducted with various stakeholders including participants from the mobile phone industry, as well as international merchants, government officials, and other informants such as journalists and academics. The three articles explicate, respectively, three aspects of shanzhai mobile phones, including creativity, adaptability, and subalternity. These articles as a whole examine shanzhai phones from production-consumption, regulatory-institutional, and postcolonial-cultural perspectives. The first article focuses on the mobile phone industry in Shenzhen, China, attributing its upgrading to the modular supply chain that has facilitated the localization of core technologies, and thus enabled supplier firms to grow out of the global production network. The second article situates Chinese-made mobile phones in South-South trade, and analyzes how companies have adapted products to address consumer needs arising from distinct environmental, socio-economic settings in emerging markets. The third article investigates the spatial co-location and industrial symbiosis between the formal and informal networks in the mobile phone industry, and examines how the imposed intellectual property regimes have been contested and negotiated by shanzhai firms. Together, the articles provide a first-hand account of the actors, processes, and institutions of the knowledge economy in the global South. Viewing technology as power-laden, value-loaded artifacts, this research argues that the shanzhai model opens up a frontier accommodating counter-narratives to patent-driven innovation and counter-practices of exclusive innovation. This dissertation contributes to a more inclusive understanding of innovation, foregrounding the agency and aspiration of peripheral actors engaged in transnational technology diffusion and adoption. Using shanzhai as a vehicle, this research revisits several conceptual binaries including the center and the periphery, the formal and the informal, and the hegemonic and the subaltern. Methodologically, this study explores new avenues for social science inquiry into innovation in the global South, where patent data are not available due to weakly enforced IPR rules.