Extending and deepening my research on innovation, creativity, and transnational knowledge work, I am investigating the innovation-driven restructuring of global production networks and the historical and contemporary role of transnational scientific and engineering workers and entrepreneurs of Chinese descent in US-China relations and global knowledge production.
My next monograph under preparation—Chimerica Biotech: Transnational Linkages in the Biotechnology Industry—will uncover the US-China linkages in the transnational biotech industry since the 1980s, focusing on the cross-border flow of racialized knowledge work and entrepreneurship, capital, technologies, and policy mobility. It will also explore how recent trends towards decoupling and strategic competition, exemplified by the trade war, the US government’s China Initiative, and China’s indigenous innovation efforts, are destabilizing these linkages and reshaping the global biotech industry and the experiences of transnationally mobile knowledge workers. This project will take me to new spaces of transnational STS, Asian American studies, and the history of US-China relations while expanding my prior engagement with information work and entrepreneurship, and industrial policy and state-building.
Lin Zhang 