Assessing China’s Economic Catch-up in a Comparative Perspective

Chapter 5 assesses China’s catch-up model, often called the Beijing Consensus, in a comparative perspective. China’s model shares several elements of the East Asian model because it also pursued the export-oriented, outward-looking growth strategies. A further commonality lies in its emphasis on the elements missing from the Washington Consensus, namely, technology policy and higher education revolution. However, the Chinese catch-up model has several unique elements that are not found in that of Taiwan or Korea. These unique features include the following: first, parallel learning from foreign direct investment firms, followed by active promotion of indigenous firms; second, forward engineering (the role of university spin-off firms) in contrast to reverse engineering adopted in Korea and Taiwan; and third, acquisition of foreign technology and brands through international mergers and acquisitions. In general, these strategies help China achieve a “compressed catch-up” and avoid several of the risks involved, including that of the “liberalization trap,” where premature financial liberalization leads to macroeconomic instability.

CRISPR-based gene expression control for synthetic gene circuits

Synthetic gene circuits allow us to govern cell behavior in a programmable manner, which is central to almost any application aiming to harness engineered living cells for user-defined tasks. Transcription factors (TFs) constitute the ‘classic’ tool for synthetic circuit construction but some of their inherent constraints, such as insufficient modularity, orthogonality and programmability, limit progress in such forward-engineering endeavors. Here we review how CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology offers new and powerful possibilities for synthetic circuit design. CRISPR systems offer superior characteristics over TFs in many aspects relevant to a modular, predictable and standardized circuit design. Thus, the choice of CRISPR technology as a framework for synthetic circuit design constitutes a valid alternative to complement or replace TFs in synthetic circuits and promises the realization of more ambitious designs.