High-tech industries have played a role in the rapid development of the Chinese economy. However, few companies that had operated under the planned economy until the liberalization and reforms in 1978 could generate and lead high-tech industries. In this situation, university-industry collaboration was promoted under government backing and has contributed to the development of high-tech industries in China.
This study aims to first clarify the actual state and development of university-industry collaboration from the 1990s to the 2000s, and then, to describe the mechanism of university-industry-government collaboration through case studies.
Two periods are shown through this study. The first is an era of a direct type of industrial creation in the 1990s, represented by university-run enterprises. This study finds that from the late 1980s to the 1990s, university-run enterprises in China increased rapidly as universities had to acquire research funds on their own because of the government’s fiscal predicament. Moreover, companies were not recipients of technology transfer, and thus, engineers in universities had to commercialize their technologies by themselves. As a result, academia outside the market complemented industry by creating and driving the development of new industries.
The second is an era of an indirect type of industrial creation from the 2000s onward. This study shows that in the early 2000s, owing to economic reforms, the direct collaboration between universities and university-run enterprises was discarded and university-run enterprises took the form of university-owned enterprises. Furthermore, this ongoing period emphasizes new technology transfer, as well as incubation facilities such as university-founded science parks. Universities now transfer technologies to outside companies, rather than form companies themselves. Thus, the universities’ role has changed from commercialization of technologies through university-run enterprises to enhancement of competitiveness among companies through technology transfers.

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After 1910, urbanization and increased use of other fertilizers resulted in the loss of the value of human waste as compost. The night soil recycling networks of Osaka, formed in the early modern period, collapsed and the city was forced to provide human waste dis-posal as a municipal service.
Previous studies on the transition to this municipal service have shown that improve-ments in hygiene conditions in Japan came later than in Western countries because Japa-nese cities depended on systems of human waste recycling networked with suburban farming villages.
However, Takeshi Nagashima compared statistical data of Osaka with that of Tokyo and raised questions about the effect of Osaka’s modern sewage disposal system. According to this study, Osaka’s typhoid morbidity rate in the 1930s was higher than that of Tokyo, which placed an emphasis on the night soil recycling system. In short, the sewage disposal system built in Osaka did not provide a fundamental solution, and problems of infectious disease persisted for a long time. Regarding reasons for this, Nagashima pointed out the city’s financial limitations but did not examine the more concrete problems Osaka faced when creating its sewage disposal system.
Thus, this paper focuses on Osaka’s night soil disposal plan and examines obstacles encountered when building a modern sewage disposal system as well as factors that pro-longed the city’s continued sanitation problems.
After human waste disposal became stagnant in the city center, the government revised the Filth Cleaning Law on May 17, 1930. The revised law included human waste as part of cities’ waste disposal obligations. After this revision, Osaka considered the construction of a sewage disposal system to be a more important municipal measure than its human waste removal service. However, despite the city’s plan, Osaka’s residents were opposed to such a measure because they were reluctant to spend much money on flush toilet installation. Therefore, the measure was ineffective in solving the city’s waste disposal problems.
In the end, Osaka was entrusted with the final disposal of human waste. Because the measure preserved the livelihoods of night soil peddlers and reduced the city’s waste dis-posal cost, the city cooperated with Osaka Prefecture and agricultural associations to build human waste storage tanks, thereby intervening in the process of human waste disposal. As a result, the city of Osaka supplied human waste to many surrounding farming villages in the prefecture, simultaneously relieving its human waste problems.

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