International technological collaboration of China from 2004 to 2008 based on patent analysis

Ever since China adopted an open-up and reform policy for the global collaboration, China's economy and technology have experienced astounding growth. Patents encompass valuable information relating to technological development and collaborative efforts. Therefore, this paper studies China's international technological collaboration (ITC) from the perspective of patent analysis in order to provide an objective statistic reference to future policy directions and academic researches. The results show that as the patents issued by the U.S. to China continuously increased from 951 in 2004 to 2653 in 2008, the internationally co-invented patents between China and other countries (regions) also exhibited a steady growth during the past five years, except in the year of 2007. USA and Taiwan are China's most important partners. Among other countries (regions) that have strong cooperation relation with China, the importance of Japan and Germany to China has been strengthened year by year; while, that of Singapore has dropped sharply. Furthermore, as the citation impact of China's total patents keeps decreasing, the international cooperation plays an active role in raising China's total citation impact. However, the raising effect gradually weakened and disappeared after 2006.