As a national strategy, China is trying to build an economy that relies on innovation rather than imitation. Clearly, its leaders recognize that being the world’s low-cost workshop for assembling the breakthrough products designed elsewhere - think iPads and a host of other high-tech goods - has its limits.

So can China become a prodigious inventor? The answer, in truth, will play out over decades - and go a long way toward determining not only China’s future, but also the shape of the global economy.

Clues to the Chinese approach emerge from a recent government document containing goals for drastically increasing the nation’s production of patents. It offers a telling glimpse of how China intends to engineer a more innovative society.

The document, published in November by the State Intellectual Property Office of China, is called the ‘National Patent Development Strategy (2011-2020).