University–industry linkages in China from the agency perspective of university engagement: a systematic literature review

China’s specific developmental context defines the need to understand its state logic of knowledge transfer, particularly from the agency perspective of universities. This paper proposes the new term ‘university engagement with industry’ (UEI) to highlight the active role of universities in university–industry linkages. A structural method is adopted to collect relevant literature and to provide a systematic and critical review of China’s UEI. This paper makes four key contributions: (1) it illustrates a structural approach to collect literature via precise and transparent identification for a targeted topic from an interdisciplinary research field; (2) it systematically presents the China-specific external institutional environment and internal governance of universities for knowledge transfer and captures influential factors for university’s embeddedness in multiscalar innovation systems; (3) it identifies China-specific UEI in comparison to Western findings; and (4) it suggests a research agenda on China’s UEI for future studies.