Abstract
China is nowadays the first market and producer in the automotive sector. However,
Chinese actors still look not able to compete internationally with the global champions of
the sector, both as automakers and component-makers. In this context, we analyse the policies
for technological upgrading of the sector, on which national government have greatly focused
since the mid-Eighties. One of the main tools used by national authorities to foster the
technological endowment of national firms is the sector opening to foreign actors, specifically
through joint ventures. Lately, however, growing emphasis on endogenous technology, and
more generally on internal markets, national firms and indigenous sources, has been put in
national industrial plan on the sector. After the analysis of the story of Chinese policy interventions
in this field, we focus on firm level data to verify empirically the differences in terms of
innovation activity of different groups of firms in the Chinese market, distinguishing among
joint ventures, wholly-Chinese and wholly-foreign owned
