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."

Comments

A bit of (non)fiction

[cptgrudge]

Envision this scenario:

China, over the next 40 or 50 years, becomes an enormous economic juggernaut. With cheap labor, high tech industry, and a huge population, China begins to develop most of the world's goods for dirt cheap prices. World consumer choice is at an all time high.

Because of the political system in place within the country, the average standard of living doesn't increase significantly.

People are not stupid. The Chinese people will see how the majority are not benefiting from the economic prosperity and attempt to change the political system. The government in place will put down initial unrest, but a civil war could occur the likes of which we have never seen in the world. The world economy that has come to depend on the Chinese government for goods.

With the ensuing economic collapse of China during the civil war, the world is plunged into a depression comparable to the late 1920's and early 1930's. The US Federal Reserve could not handle the removal of a huge portion of the world economy from the picture.

Following the civil war, a democratic government is created in China, and the economy becomes similar to many western countries, with a higher standard of living and increased wages. The economic playing field is now leveled.

Either that, or everybody nukes everybody. Whatever happens, I'll be dead by then. Oh well.

Re:Once again, let me REPEAT myself

[aminorex]

China is the principal threat to US hegemony in
several ways. By 2010 pentagon force projections
estimate that they will have more nuclear warheads
targetted in the US than will Russia. The US is
legally bound to the defense of Taiwan against
attack. Because they abort their female fetuses
in large numbers (and female infanticide is endemic)
they have a large surplus male population at
cannon-fodder age. Their economy is growing at 9%
annually while the US economy is shrinking. They
have the benefit of the balance of trade, which
gives them increasing cash reserves, and a consequent
ability to manipulate capital markets.

Calling the CCP "Communist" is like calling
scientology a religion -- it's a gross abuse of
the denotative meaning of the term. The CCP
is a collection of warlord factions not unlike
the KMT in 1910, or any of a hundred other
examples from Chinese history.

The CCP may well be the most powerful organized
entity on the face of the earth today, and it
is utterly ruthless. It has imposed an hereditary
caste system on the Chinese people, utterly
crushes any sort of labor organization, in fact
maintains a gulag system of millions of literal
slave laborers, forces hundreds of thousands of
abortions on unwilling women every year, and has
a history of wild oscillations in policy that
result in mass starvation, brutalization, and
dehumanization.

Really, it's not very unlike the U.S. government,
except that it's violence is directed inward,
against the peasants and workers and intelligentsia,
instead of outward, against swarthy people who
have oil. Both systems represent an intense
concentration of power under the domination of
one autocratic ruler. Both systems use political
parties to exclude meaningful dissent. Both
systems manipulate law to funnel funds into the
hands of crony feudal barons. Both systems
exercise strangling control over the mass media
to preclude meaningful democracy.

But the Chinese nukes are pointed at *me*, while
the U.S. nukes are pointed *away*, so I prefer
to see the U.S. hang on to its global empire
for a few more decades, please.

Oh, and we are selling them shit. Such as VSAT
technology (Hughes/Loral) and missile technology
(McDonnel and TRW), thanks to the millions funnelled
by the "People's Liberation Army" into the
Clinton/Gore campaigns.

The chinese people are wonderful, and the
chinese culture is amazingly deep and beautiful,
as is the language. But the chinese state is
perhaps the single greatest source of human
evil on the face of this planet, and as such
it should be given all the respect one gives
a rabid predator. That dragon is not a mascot
or a pet. It breathes fire, and it is waking
up from a long sleep.