Abstract: In the context of increasing international technological constraints and unbalanced supply and demand of domestic innovative talents, the optimization of innovative talents cultivation policies has become the prerequisite and foundation for achieving high-quality economic growth. Based on the Chinese context, this paper has adopted a policiometric approach to sort out the current status and problems of China′s innovative talents cultivation policy from 1996 to 2019, and put forward suggestions on improving relevant policies. According to the research findings, the Chinese government has been putting greater emphasis on the supportive policy for cultivating innovative talents year by year, and relevant policies have evolved through three different stages: "undertaken wholly by the government - highly centralized management by the government-leadership role taken by the government". In addition, Chinese government′s policies on cultivating innovative talents have been characterized by the gradual downgrading of government levels engaged in relevant policy-making, uneven distribution of policies in different parts of China, integrated implementation of various types of policies, and initial formation of a collaboration framework of various policy-makers. Moreover, several features stand out in terms of policy content, which includes the focus on talents at the mid-and-lower end of the innovation value chain, a greater number of supply-based policy tools as compared with environmental policy tools and demand-based policy tools, the combination of both centralized and decentralized management with high discretionary power given to individual official or expert, and a relatively formalized talents examination and evaluation system which has broken free from the traditional mechanism with excessive emphasis on the education background and qualifications of talents. However, there are still some flaws in China′s innovative talents cultivation policies, such as the lack of foresight, poor coordination, weak guiding effect, and deficiencies in standardization and functionality, which have given rise to a number of problems including the failure of identifying the ideal cultivation object and imbalance in the talents cultivation structure, low efficiency of policy tools, and lack of both specialization and authenticity in the examination and assessment results that are used to select talents. In addition, a prominent problem has emerged during the process of policy resource allocation, where the entities in urgent need of policy resources found it hard to gain support, while entities with abundant resources were given easy access to even more policy supports. In view of these problems, an overhaul of relevant policies requires a change in the mindset and a shift of focus from skills to academic study and scientific research. Moreover, the government should provide stronger support for fundamental researches and ramp up the adoption of supply policy tools while applying necessary regulations and constraints. On top of that, the government should reinforce the measures to better protect the intellectual property, roll out protective demand policies and economic cushion policies to provide fallback for business owners in times of difficulty, and facilitate the transformation of government functions from leading the people to guiding the people. This paper has filled in the gap in the current researches for its contribution in the following aspects: comprehensive study of China′s overall innovative talents cultivation policy system, quantitative analysis of these policies, and review of these policies in the Chinese context.

Key words:  innovative talents cultivation policy, Chinese context, policiometrics, high-quality economic growth, Citespace