China Attracting R&D Labs

Microsoft is setting up a major new R&D lab in China. Microsoft is not the only multinational company to use China as a base for research and development. In recent years hundreds of them have set up laboratories here, and Chinese officials claim the number is growing by 200 a year.

The labs vary in size and ambition, but as they multiply and expand they may help China grow from mostly a user and copier of advanced technologies developed elsewhere into a powerful incubator of its own, industry executives and experts say. And the shift may eventually reshape applied research, jobs and policies in the United States and other developed countries.

"The Chinese are going to become sources of innovation,'' said Denis Fred Simon, a specialist in Chinese science and technology who is provost of the new graduate-level Levin Institute of the State University of New York. "They will find themselves enmeshed in global R.& D. more and more.''

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