China: the New Advanced Technology Research Hotbed 452
securitas writes "The New York Times' Chris Buckley reports that China is the new hotbed of advanced technology research and development for hundreds of global technology companies. The list includes household names like Oracle (which 'opened a lab in Beijing to tailor its Linux operating software to suit its Asian customers'), Motorola, Siemens, IBM, Intel, General Electric, Nokia and others. Microsoft Research Asia hopes Google-surpassing technology comes from a group of '10 researchers ... working on new ways to drill deep into the Internet and select and organize the information found there.' Growth of the R&D sector in China is so rapid that 'within five years China could overtake Britain, Germany and Japan as a base for corporate research, leaving it second only to the United States.'"
Re:The irony (Score:5, Interesting)
Kylin and China development (Score:4, Interesting)
And Kylin [chinatechnews.com] is supposed to be a windows, linux, unix and *BSD and MacOS beater ! Interesting stuff!
After the 2008 Olympics people will wake up to a reality, how advanced China is! I think it is great! Lets hope China becomes a huge adopter of linux!
How many Chinese
Looking forward to 2008. See you there!
Re:Any link to China-Linux here? (Score:4, Interesting)
Raise Your Hand (Score:5, Interesting)
Over a decade back China placed great emphasis on education in technology, now with a large pool of talent to draw from the country is in a great position to harness it's own technology future, as well as that of other countries.
Meanwhile in the US, students care about being cool, having the latest toys and what others think. Only nerds actually study.
Perhaps chinese youth will catch up to the slovenly and egocentric ways of the west. Some chinese diplomat, back in the 1800's said something to the effect of 'China already has everything and needs nothing, what can Europe offer to China?' Well, the answer was Opium. Maybe the next opium craze in china will be western fashion, television and SUV's.
Re:Any link to China-Linux here? (Score:5, Interesting)
The country has been pushing heavily for all kinds of tech development; if you'll recall, the US and china had a rift a while ago over China trying to force hardware to release proprietary fabrication and design information if they wanted to have access to China's markets. China wants to take the US and Japan's places as the leading international tech powerhouses. It's probably a good strategy, too - they have a large, well educated (at least in urban areas) population. I think they can pull it off.
And, as unpopular as this statement might be... I think their largely totalitarian government - so long as they don't infringe enough on their people so as to reduce their work ethic, their national pride, and the ability for businesses to compete with each other - will actually help them in competition with the US, due to the greater degree of strategic control they can have over their markets. The US would have a lot more trouble trying to do things like force foreign companies to disclose their tech secrets, apart from outright spying.
Re:Raise Your Hand (Score:3, Interesting)
Could it be because India is a democracy and at least partially looks after its rural communities and environment, whereas the autocratic Chinese government can promise businesses protection from labor unrest and environmental regulation? Or are the Indians too protectionist with regard to foreign ownership?
Re:Within 5 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
And, when you're China and can manage to get your billion-plus population to cooperate...you pretty much don't have anone that can effectively compete against you. It is really quite genious houw they worked that out, even considering the social hardships that we consider them to have (for who are we to tell others what is and is not a hardship anyway?).
Re:This is Good for World Peace (Score:2, Interesting)
It has happend before, and it will happen again.
Re:its about time... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Is "insourcing" a word? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the Chinese government is behind and it is a plan. It the high tech version of what they've been doing to manufacturing for a few years now. Undercut manufacturing in the rest of the world especially through low labor costs, the rest of the world gives up and moves all their machine tools, manufacturing capibility and technology to China, the rest of the world becomes completely dependent on China for manufacturing and they can so start to jack up their prices because they no will soon have no competition worth mentioning.
The end result is one giant American or European company after another is transfering the crown jewels of their intellectual property in to a country that has complete disdain for intellectual property rights and enforcement. Once its all transfered and Chinese nationals are the ones doing all the new development the foreign devil companies are going to be completely expendable and expended.
Its a great strategy for catapulting yourself from a technology backwater where you are mostly reverse engineering and soldering to global technological dominion.
The stupidity of American politicians and business leaders is truly amazing especially when they are blinded by greed.
Well, we did this to ourselves. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the major problems is that we don't have enough people who are willing to pursue basic research, or who are intellectually up to the task. Someone has to step up and explain to students that science and engineering aren't dead end career paths! Not everyone can be a lawyer or investment banker, and almost no one can be a rock star or sports hero. Unfortunately for us, China still has central planning, and can dump everything into a project that it can (see the Great Leap Forward for an example.) Communist countries are well-known for forced industrialization efforts. The government could let the peasants starve for a few years and become the number one science power on the planet if they wanted to.
Comparative stats (Score:4, Interesting)
GDP $6.449T
GDP Growth 9.1%
Inflation 1.2%
PerCap Income $5000
Phones (LL) 214M
CellPhones 240M
Internet Users 59M
Internet Hosts 156,53
TV Stations 3240
Population 1.2B
Pop. Growth
Interesting numbers (from another post I saw here). Maybe the most telling is how the average person makes $5000 (US Equiv), but how many more cellphone there are. Does this mean there is a higher willingness to adopt new technology in China? Or do they just like cellphones more than 'we' do? Maybe they don't have to put up with Sprint....
Re:Is "insourcing" a word? (Score:4, Interesting)
And it cuts both ways: The West still has a political requirement to appear free and capitalistic, but is increasingly becoming more statist. The increasing statism is part of our governments' plans to consolidate power in the face of declining domestic R&D capabilities. (An undereducated population's easier to control, so why not outsource the R&D, and bring the profits back home, in the form of earnings to shareholders, and taxes on the profits and any income distributed to shareholders? Spend the taxes on making sure the non-shareholders have enough cash to buy the cheap goods you're making offshore, and everyone's happy!)
As a fringe benefit, we get to beta-test the new surveillance and data-mining techniques on a population not subject to the few remaining privacy limits in the West, and to see how various methods of social control work against various groups of unreliable social elements.
50 years ago, or even 20 years ago, that model wasn't viable; most states that tried it wound up collapsing under the weight of their own bureaucracies. East Germany was probably the worst example; there were so many people filing records for STASI that there was nobody left to design or build the new toys.
> Frankly, I find the whole thing fascinating.
Ditto. China seems to have achieved the social stability and unity of purpose normally associated with totalitarianism, without sacrificing the rising standards of living afforded by capitalism. It's actually a pretty cool model.
(Which is a good thing, because it's the model we'll probably end up with whether we think it's cool or not :)
Re:Money goes where... (Score:1, Interesting)
First, most of the poor in the USA don't have enough money to by more than 3 suits of clothes.
Second, the Banking system in The USA is flush with bad loans ( Enrons and the likes ) and, if something isn't done ( get bush out of presidency ), it will colapse ( US total debt as nearly doubled ) . Either way, it will be very painful to fix.
Third, USA as been in a major energy crisis , for a log time
Forth, what do you think will happen when all those poor peole realize that their 'leaders' are reaping all the profits? ( nothing )
Fifth, what happens to those stock holdings if USA ever nationalizes our investements? ( BTW the stock market where IBM , Dell and others are is not China
"The world isn't a nice place"
All due to The US and there politics
And The US is the Worst , they can do something to fix things but they decide its not in there interest to do so. The #1 terrorist organization in the world is the CIA
The US dont like anyone not even themself
"as soon as they can, they will rid themselves of us. "
Why , your doing the job for them
Re:its about time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't show your ignorance of the world by mimicking Dubya. You are neither the President, nor his Lackey.
Re:Any link to China-Linux here? (Score:3, Interesting)
biotech is being squahed by the right wingers
If you're going to troll, at least get your facts straight:
But it gets better. The reason why embrionic stem cell research isn't being done in the US is because there's no future in it!
Why bother researching embrionic stem cells when adult stem cells are already being used to develop cures? Even given enough research money, developing a pratical therapy using embrionic stem cells is at least 15 to 20 years away.
Biotech isn't dying in the US. Instead, drug companies are pushing expensive cures for mild ailments (heartburn?!) instead of developing the relatively expensive and risky treatments for more serious conditions. It isn't the Feds - it is economics - there's more money in selling a heartburn medication to hundreds of millions than in finding a cure for AIDS.
Re:Money goes where... (Score:3, Interesting)
You raised some good points.
Also, if you look at how China is investing that money, they are propping up US securities as well.
That makes me wonder, if China fails to buy US government securities, because of a banking collapse, what will that do to the value of our dollar with a record 384 Billion deficit?
Not a pretty thought.
-Hack
Re:Any link to China-Linux here? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you seem to have a VERY limited knowledge of Chinese history, both recent and ancient. Look up things like the cultural revolution and the great leap forward. There is control of markets in action! China has always managed to grow at an astounding pace to only fall into ruin, moreso than most other civilizations of the world. Things are going pretty well now, but that is way too small a timeline to say that China's government is so wonderful. China will hit a bust, and with their government, the bust will be as loud as the boom.
ohhhh, I dunno.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know it's fun to generalise, but "alternative culture" also lends itself to innovation, dreaming, rejection of the staid status quo, etc. It's not just drugs and losers. Way back, when we shifted from being called "beatniks" to "hippies" WE were the ones to point out ridiculous illegal wars and draft slavery. We were the first ones to say "wait a minnit, why are all these global international corporations running our nation?" WE marched and took the gas on behalf of non priveleged minorites and in support of equal gender rights. We'd say stuff like "Hey, what do you mean we don't have full property rights, we want to build a yurt instead of a boring square stick frame box you insensitive clod!" And so on and so forth. Poison free food? Certainly wasn't the suits pushing that. Medical care that WORKS and don't cost an arm and a leg and don't all go to enrich global medical monopolies? Check who was a big part of that movement. And now to get to normal slashdotisms, who's pushing open source the most?
So, how about a little credit along with the deserved dissin, every generation and culture got good and bad to it.