Technological Self-reliance: Sturdy Ideal or Self-serving Rhetoric

For the purposes of this paper, words are used as follows:

Transfer of technology

By ‘transfer of technology to developing countries’ I understand ‘getting knowledge that is only in some foreigners’ heads into the heads of one’s own nationals’. The learning process may well be largely accomplished by buying and studying some piece of imported capital equipment in which the new knowledge is embodied, as when the Japanese government bought its first Jacquard loom, and had its craftsmen dismantle and assemble it time after time until they had learned its technology and could then begin to think about devising or buying or stealing the technology of making it. And nowadays it may be a sensible shortcut to import both machine and its original devisers in some form of joint venture. But it is entirely possible for technology to be transferred as blueprints or as images in someone’s head.