Abstract: Tax incentives have positive effects on promoting high-tech industries. Since mid 1980s, China has formulated a series of tax preferential policies to encourage and promote the development of relevant high-tech industries in China. About one hundred China’s tax preferential policy documents on high-tech industries ranging from 1987 to 2008 are selected first time and then frequency analysis and quantitative analysis on them are conducted from four dimensions, which are annual policy promulgation, subjects of preferential policies, categories of preferential taxes, and measures of tax preferential policies. These analyses reveal the general situation of China’s tax preferential policies for high-tech industries and the development process, but at the same time, it is also found that China’s tax preferential policies for high-tech industries have four-category problems in enhancing China’s independent innovation capability. First, these policies display an obvious time-phase characteristic and an imbalance in annual frequency and density, and consequentially their continuity and stability need to be further improved; second, benefits of tax incentives are more focused on regions and are lack of industry orientation; third, categories of preferential taxes are primarily related to income tax and VAT tax in order to support the production inputs and the transformation of research findings by innovation enterprises, and therefore these preferential polices are lack of effective incentives towards the R&D process of enterprises; fourth, measures of tax incentives are mainly in the form of direct reduction of tax rate or amount, and less resort to indirect means, such as investment credits, accelerated depreciation, R&D costs deduction or tax credit, technology development fund extraction, etc. Comments and suggestions are proposed in here to address these problems.

Key words: high-tech industry, tax preferential policy, content analysis