Nation-States' S&T Strategies, Governance Challenges, and Legitimacy Construction

Nation-states increasingly treat science, technology, and innovation as strategic domains—arenas where national ambitions, governance challenges, and questions of legitimacy converge. Bringing together empirically grounded studies, this session explores how states mobilize technology to address governance dilemmas, how scientific and industrial actors navigate national agendas, and how technical expertise is rendered authoritative in the public sphere.

The session currently includes four papers in the Chinese context. The first probes the deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and artificial intelligence in Chinese healthcare provision and illustrates how China’s strategy of healthcare governance has shifted from governing through information and service flows to governing through the scalable reproduction of expertise. The second leverages China’s burgeoning biotechnology industries to probe the role of nationalism in technological development, arguing that nationalist discourse in this context functions less as evidence of state control than as a mode of strategic impression management enabling firms and scientists to secure legitimacy, attract state attention, mitigate tensions, and move fluidly across the domains of science, market, and state. The third turns to law and science, showing how popular media in China transform forensic and legal expertise into a purified “public science”—objective, authoritative, and seemingly free from social and political interests. The fourth focuses on the implementation of China’s smart city and complex urban governance issues.

The session invites further contributions addressing state strategies for developing, governing, and deploying emerging technologies (AI, biotechnology, digital infrastructure, and beyond); expertise and its reproduction; and comparative perspectives on innovation policy.