International innovation cooperation is crucial to the enhancement of national technological innovation capabilities in the context of globalization. Does the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as a major international initiative, promote innovation cooperation between China and BRI partner countries? Taking the top 80 global countries in innovation capability as the research sample, this paper uses the DID method to answer this question. The empirical results show that the BRI indeed promoted innovation cooperation between them to a certain extent. Specifically, it significantly increased the proportion of their cooperative patents in China’s total patents, and the promotion effect was more obvious for countries with better economic foundations. Furthermore, the mechanism tests indicate that shortening the institutional distance, strengthening the exchange of scientific and technological talents, and stimulating cultural differences were important mechanisms promoting their innovation cooperation. Although the BRI did not significantly increase the proportion of cooperative patents in BRI partner countries’ total patents, it effectively improved their innovation foundations and capabilities.

China’s rural industrialization, which flourished in the 1980s, has suddenly declined since the mid-1990s. Based on the perspective of institutional change of rural collective construction land, this paper discusses the reasons behind the rise and fall of China’s rural industrialization. Using the empirical tests of China’s provincial panel data from 1987 to 1997, it is found that from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, the government relaxed the regulation of collective construction land and allowed its transfer, which was the institutional basis for the rapid rise of China’s rural industrialization with township and village enterprises (TVEs) as the main form. Furthermore, this paper takes the government’s policy of prohibiting the circulation of collective construction land from the mid-1990s as the breakthrough point, and uses the “Land Administration Law of China” promulgated in 1998 as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the causal relationship between restricting the circulation of collective construction land and the decline of TVEs. It is found that the restrictions on the circulation of collective construction land caused by the implementation of the law significantly hindered the development of TVEs. After the implementation of the Land Administration Law, in areas affected more by the law, the development scale of their TVEs shrunk even more. The analysis of this paper shows that deepening the reform of the system of property rights on agricultural land and ensuring farmers’ rights of land circulation are important ways to revitalize the rural areas.