How national missions reshape policy networks: evidence from China’s STI policy-making collaborative network, 1978–2023

Science, technology and innovation (STI) policy in China is made jointly by many government agencies, so the way those agencies collaborate bears on what innovation governance can achieve. This study examines that collaborative network, drawing on 1010 STI policy documents issued jointly by central government agencies between 1978 and 2023. Policy network theory and the mission-oriented innovation policy framework are combined with multi-period social network analysis to trace how the network expanded and how the position of individual agencies changed. Three findings emerge. The network expanded in an orderly way across five stages, growing from 8 to 73 participating agencies, while the cohesion index stayed above 0.68 throughout and reached its highest value in the most recent stage, so growth in scale did not come at the cost of cohesion. Agency roles moved from a single dominant core towards a differentiated division of labour, and four role types can be distinguished, namely Agenda Leader, Boundary Spanner, Innovation Seed and Resource Hub. Successive upgrades in national science and technology missions coincided closely with these changes in structure. The trajectory observed here departs from the movement from policy community to issue network that Western policy network theory anticipates, and may mark a third path of mission-driven orderly expansion, although a descriptive design supports association and not causal attribution. The findings bear on how policy network theory might be extended to state-led innovation systems.