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China: the New Global High-Tech Power
Andy Tai writes "This three-part news.com special report shows how mainland China has become the focus of high tech business opportunities during the global recession. The article compares today's China to 19th Century America as "a booming nation starved for products and driven by a new generation of entrepreneurs", points out China's "sheer numbers and ambitious work ethic are producing thousands of engineers--and U.S. companies are recruiting the best of them," and concludes "that this may eventually be known as China's high-tech century. " Another good article looking at China's rise as a global power can be found here."
I cannot believe that the parent to this post was modded up. Some of the above points are valid concerns, but others are problems of the past.
Of course, every time there is talk about China, someone has to bring up something about Human Rights. But give me a break, clean water? food? China has gotten past that stage a long time ago. Right now overnutrition and obesity troubles much of the population. As for the judicial system, fairness is a matter of opinion. In China, criminals are punished more severely than in the US. Corruption in the governance is a problem in China, but the same problem exists in every country. The USA, for example, is a prime source of governmental scandals. China is working on a more efficient education system as we speak. The problem with education lies in overpopulation. Think about it, China has more than four times the population of America, andd merely building more schools will not be able to solve the problem overnight. The curriculum in Chinese primary and secondary schools includes a much more in depth understanding of subjects such as math and science than that of American schools.
I guess my point is that although China's fundations are not yet perfect, it is getting better at a faster rate than any other country.
#1 China is not a "commie country". Sure the government is dominated by the "Communist Party" and is the product of a "communist revolution", but that doesn't make it a "commie country" in anything other than name.
#2 Communism means a lot of things. In the case of China their brand is "Maoist", or used to be anyways. In traditional Marxism Communism is the end state of a historical process, the idea being that a strong State run by "the Workers" will be created first to restructure society in the interest of people (i.e. along Socialist lines). Eventually the State will "whither away" and the Communist utopia will be created.
#3 Marx anticipated this happening in an advanced industrialized Capitalist system. Then along came Marxist-Lennism (i.e. the Russian Revolution) and the Maoists. Both of which were lead by peasants.
#4 Soviet Russia and Communist China are both really bad examples of theoretical Communism or Socialism, they are both very unique systems which, though influenced by Communism/Socialism, are not at all true to their foundation. (Which perhaps says something about the feasibility of said foundation).
#5 Both Soviet Russia and Communist China have been hugely succesful if you measure success along the lines of literacy or economic growth.
They are C-O-M-M-U-N-I-S-T-S
China now allows entrepreneurs in the "communist party". They are moving employees and businesses from the state sector to the private sector as quickly as possible. They are experimenting with village elections. In other words, they are trying to shed communism without imploding as the USSR did.
They want us D-E-A-D
Oh really? I've met hundreds of Chinese people and none of them seem to want us dead. I guess they hide their hatred well.
Why the HOLY FUCKING HELL are we selling them shit?
Mostly we are buying stuff from them, not selling to them. After all, we have money, they make cheap stuff.
ht after the USSR went down the tube and the nuke threat was gone we should have bombed the living hell out of them.
I'm just going to quit now. You're obviously not worth talking to.
Well, I have the unique perspective of a geek who just spent a bunch of time in China. It's an interesting place; plenty of contrasts, the bicycle rickshaw with a load of LCD displays outside Tsinghua university was one of them. The funny thing is the cities are capitalist and growing at a considerable rate. The countryside, where the bulk of the population is, is neither. And to move between the countryside and the city you need a visa. That sounds like a stable situation to me.
Already many of the cities have a comparable standard of living to the US; except it's very different. I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Shenzhen and enjoyed a view of Hong Kong from my towering hotel room; the city was beautiful. 20 years ago 6000 people lived in a fishing village there. They made it a special economic zone and now 6 million people live there. Not a bad demonstration of the power of capitalism.
I talked to some girls who worked at a nearby coffee shop. They were basically indentured servitudes for the coffee shop. They lived in a company dorm and the company gave them food. The company was, oddly enough, based out of Taiwan.
So that was a little strange.
The lack of a free press made people's view of america interesting; basically they had no idea of what life was like in the US and asked a lot of silly questions. But, they did have access to US movies, through the form of street markets or random guys on street corners who ask you if you want a DVD or VCD. So many people had seen US movies and were curious whether movies such as American Pie truely represented life in America.
Conclusions? China is still a third world country with some parts approaching second world quality of living. It'll be a while before they give us a run for the money. Smart, ambitious people in China still want to come to the US.
-Jay Thomas
http://www.uiuc.edu/~jthomas2
The government is not "military run", and "tens of thousands" is the total number of annual executions (out of a population of 1.3billion), not the number of political dissidents who are executed.