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The purpose of this paper is to look into the transformation of local innovation systems in the high-tech parks of Shanghai and Beijing and their technological learning and upgrading. The areas that we have chosen to investigate are Beijing's Zhongguancun and Shanghai's Yangpu District. The main reason that we selected these two areas for study is because they are home to most of the top universities and R&D institutes in these two cities. Our main focus will be on how institutions—the local state, inter-firm relations and the relationship between R&D institutions and firms—are co-evolving to shape and constrain a local system of innovation. Our research finds that the capacities and autonomy of the Zhongguancun of Beijing's Haidian District and Yangpu District of Shanghai differ in various aspects, but both regions are struggling to upgrade innovation and enhance economic development. The ‘high-tech cluster’ provides a useful instrument or label to achieve goals other than innovation and R&D. Elite universities are regarded as engines for network formation, but visible and invisible walls of Chinese universities discount efforts to foster a university-centered innovation hub which especially shows in the Yangpu case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conventional wisdom holds that the high competitiveness of the newspapers in Beijing and Shanghai is due to fast economic development in these cities. This research, however, finds that the degrees of newspaper competitiveness in Beijing and Shanghai do not relate positively to their GDP growth rates. While Shanghai's GDP outranks Beijing, the newspaper business in Beijing outgrows Shanghai. This paper argues that under the current Chinese management system, economic impact upon newspapers' development is limited. Only after the government management over media is reformed, can economic factors become a decisive force behind newspapers' innovation and advertising competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]