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China: the New Advanced Technology Research Hotbed
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.'"
China announces massive adoption of Linux.
A short time later, China emerges as a research-leader...
Of course you CAN do research with closed-source operating systems like Windows, but you have to wait until Microsoft ALLOWS you to.
*chuckle*
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
What's most fascinating about this, to me at least, is that in Western countries, this would be just a sort of emergent phenomenon, unpredicted and unplanned. But in China, odds are good that this is a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese government.
Which, incidentally, is something that a lot of people seem to overlook: China's economy is becoming more and more capitalistic, but China is still politically and socially very much a state-run nation. The increasing captilism is part of the government's plan to bring the Chinese economy to the forefront of the world, and I tend to believe that this surge in R&D is just as much a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese government.
Frankly, I find the whole thing fascinating.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
... to lift technology export restrictions. Right now. All of them. (Okay, with the exception of classified military research -- but we should also take a hard look at what's classified, and why, and whether keeping it classified does any good.) Once upon a time, when the US and its European allies were the only source for high tech, this policy made a certain amount of sense on national security grounds. But now, the restrictions only serve to weaken national security, by hurting the technology base in the US -- or are simply annoyances to be worked around by companies like Microsoft and Oracle, which are theoretically US companies but are in fact loyal only to themselves.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The irony of the "google beating search" is that it's being done in a country that heavily censors the internet. I wonder what they might use a powerful search engine for...?
So are you treated better or worse over there as a research assistent than over here in the USA?
Engineering and the Ultimate
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.'
Great, and within 10 years they'll probably surpass the USA. That is the direction everything's heading- outsourcing the skilled, high tech, and R&D work is going to hollow out the US economy until it collapses in on itself like a neutron star...
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Sorry to say it, but I really don't find anything dissatisfying about the way Google selects and organizes information found on the Internet. Rarely do I ever even look at the second page of search results, because the first one always has the information I was after.
If Microsoft wants to beat Google, they're going to have to pick a different venue.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Many people make fun of Nixon, but his Sunshine Policy with regard to China has really helped China and the world. Can you imagine China as closed and belligerent as North Korea ?
And the other thing is competition is good for everyone.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
More likely, they'll be "outsourcing" to those areas of China which, right now, are effectively still living in the Middle Ages. Coastal China is now very nearly First World, but they've got a lot of Second and Third World inside the country to work with. And they're patient.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Come on where's all the expected whining? These are 'potential' American research jobs, aren't they? High paying, cutting edge positions. If this article was about India I am sure all the regulars would be coming out of the woodwork.
Maybe it just goes to show...
All money flows as fast as possible to where it can grow the fastest.
Think you can double you money fast in US stocks? Fat chance. But in China companies are growing like crazy.
The US has peaked because everyone is already consuming at 110%, about set for a complete economic meltdown. China has a billion poor people, just waiting to spend all their money on stuff, and they don't speak English. *gasp*
That and a PhD researcher will cost you like $US 200/month.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Considering that companies (MS, IBM, et al.) are patent whoring (whether be defensive or strategic in nature) in the US and reverse engineering is now considered to be a crime in most cases, it is stifling innovation. The US is now a sue-society where money talks and lesser companies/individuals are being held back my the corporate oligarchy.
Add to that the "bad stigma" associated with stem cell research here in the US...it's no surprise to me that the R&D in the US is declining and increasing in the world where people are less shackled by legal systems/lobbyist (now shackled human rights saved for another discussion)
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Now I can't complain too much, because these country's high-school kids have better educations than your average college kid here. But it sure seems like this practice is narrowing the gap between a PhD and high-schooler.
I just wonder how many of the companies mentioned in this article are falling for the "everyone in our town has a PhD or two" pitch so many of these cities are selling them.
do you speak or read chinese?
Not only are they patient, they are controlling resources. They do not have destructive competition as we do here. If competition is good for the economy, they keep it. If it is bad, they simply repurpose a company. There is no redoubling of effort for no perceived gain.
As an additional caveat, they get to completely skip the industrial revolution, but get all the benefits. They didn't have to invent and refine the assembly line, the cotton gin, the milling machine, anything that would increase production. They simply bought them. And when they couldn't buy them, they threw their biggest natural resource at the problem; their population.
It's socialist capitalization, and unfortunately for us, it's quite effective!
I saw someone crediting communism in this thread. Here is my reply to all those people:
I would not credit communism in this case. I call myself a communist and in my opinion (and most others) China is absoluteley not a communist nation.
I would credit the totalitarian system in china. If the leader(s) in such a system are working towards a goal, it will always reach that goal more effectively than a democracy (since the democratic process often slow things down - especially if it something that is unpopular - like terraforming a planet). However, more often than not, you end up with a leadership that spends most of its time on quelling resistance or abusing its powers, wich you do not want!
Totalitarian systems are verry bad things - even if it is more effective (like china) in some cases, for obvious reasons.
It's pretty obvious what a censoring, Big Brother state wants do with an extremely powersul search engine:
In Communist China, the search engine looks for YOU!
could it be that every company in the USA and most companies elsewhere is struggling to establish any relation it can with a million zillion chinese prospective customers?
Oh that involves investing a little bit? Well that's the nature of buisiness. What? You want us to put some jobs over there? Sure! How about some research jobs? They are egghead and cool-sounding, but that leaves us with the all-important administrative jobs still here in the west... wouldn't want to outsource ourselves now, would we?
After a few big companies get burned by having their IP stolen by the Chinese, I suspect that the lure of cheap, highly educated labor will wane.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm not a pessimist about technology, but I'm disappointed in what has passed for technology since, say the 1960s. As they say --where's the flying cars damnit? It was supposed to be like radio, black and white TV, color TV, high speed Internet, holographic immersion, direct neural interface and beyond already. It's 2004! What happened? It's practically the same as the seventies.
You know, when the iMac counts as a technological breakthrough things are slow. No offense to the Mac lovers, but it was more of a design breaktrhough than anything. That's just one of many examples of that same thing where it's a new style as opposed to a radically new technology. Cars get this treatment all the time. The differnce between the new model and the old model is the freakin' plastic brake light reflectors. That's not an advance. That sucks.
The Internet itself is another example. Just because a series of factors made it seem to emerge suddenly, it isn't really the case that it happened suddenly at all. Mostly it was just a matter of merging rather dated defence research into the private sector. Same with a lot of chip designs. It's not really all that amazing or recent. It just took a long time to make it your way.
And as for CMOS process tecnologies and the whole Moore's Law thing. Give me a break, that was not and is not really about pusing the edge of technology as much as it was about markets being controlled by only a few players being able to afford to compete.
Immersion lithography which is part of what is making China so hot was experimented with decades ago and abandoned because it didn't fit the business plans of the likes of Intel or IBM at the time.
So, when I see this stuff about China being the new "technology research hotbed" it doesn't strike me as being all that meaningful. It's the new manufacturing center for chips. So what.
I mean besides CMOS chip technology which is already very, very mature its hard to point to real major technology that has been developed in the last forty years with any serious economic significance. Okay lasers, though for the most part just the small ones, have improved a lot and small motors are more reliable. Anything outside of IT though? Even MEMS is still mostly about IT. There's promises about ultra efficient fuel cells and nanotubes and such but there were promises forty years ago as well. They even had better promises back then. We're still building houses out of wooden sticks for crying out loud.
Technology outside of IT moves unbelievably slowly.
So, if China is where the chips are going to be made then naturally you'll have a lot of designers there making consumer products, but is that really a technology research hotbed? I'd call it more like a designer extravaganza.
I do hope it could be otherwise, but I don't know. Something tells me we're still going to have internal combustion autos a hundred years from now.
However, like I said, I'm not a pessimist. I think the revenge we will get is that we'll live incredibly long lives so we will eventually see the flying cars, space elevators and what-not. We'll just have to be very patient. All I expect out of China is cheaper PCs. As if they weren't cheap already.
And maybe then, people in the US will FINALLY realize that the US is not the center of the universe.
And yes, I am a born-and-raised American. I am just so friggin sick of this idea that the USA is the greatest country in the world and that it always will be. It isn't a big surprise that the "rest of the world" will catch up to and probably surpass us in lots of things. Think automobile production in the 70s. Think electronics. Think military. We are so used to being bullies and living in our own minds that we have forgotten the rest of the world. How many times have you heard something like: "France doesn't like our politics? Screw 'em, who needs the French anyway?" I have heard it way too much. The US is probably the least worldly nation on the planet. (that should be)
Not to start a flamewar, but this is what the Bush administration has been basing its entire existence on! And it hasn't just been Bush, it has been our entire government over the last XXX years.
Unfortunately, it will probably take something catastrophic like a shift in the tech sector, or even worse some military shift to wake people up in this country.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Actually it should serve to make US lawmakers ask hard questions about US Companies "Offshoring" R&D to China. China is a major long-term security threat to the US. Giving them a major economic-techbological base "hands them the rope they'll use to hang us!".
Porting a software package to Chinese is "advanced technology research"? Writing a new search function is "advanced technology research"? I don't see any other examples of what this "advanced technology research" consists of, other than Nokia moving its programming operations to China, which is also not "advanced technology research."
"Within five years China could overtake Britain, Germany and Japan as a base for corporate research, leaving it second only to the United States."
Yeah, maybe, if you define "corporate research" as "learning how to use ten year old technology."
The evil communist Chinese geniuses planned this going back to Mao and continuing with the Gang of Four and Deng and so on. Keep the masses low in power so labor costs are low so we can sucker the western world into outsourcing and thereby lowering themselves economically by raising us economically.
Riiiight. You've sold me on that idea, sonny.
I got offshored, and it's a bitch finding a job. I don't like it. But outsourcing and offshoring are a natural result of a free market, and if I believe in a free market when it comes to steel and cars, I'd be pretty hypocritical to suddenly stop when my own ox is being gored.
Repeat: outsourcing and offshoring are natural parts of a free market.
You know what I like best about having a global economy? It encourages cooperation and reduces the chances of war. The Chinese are learning that trade --> booming economy, and they like that. Sooner or later they will realize that huge primitive army is best converted to gainful employment.
The US used to know this, until Shrub found a golden opportunity to finish Daddy's war and help his oil buddies. The US is now going to learn it again, just as Microsoft has taught the rest of the computer industry that playing with Microsoft doesn't involve a level playing field, and Microsoft finds it harder and harder to find partners. Coalitions of the willing require partners, not the old style teamwork where the leader cracks the whip and the team pulls harder.
Infuriate left and right
Competition can only be a good thing (after all, it is what cpitalism is built on). With more people working on nanotech and biotech and stem cell research, the right wing in the US can only back down on issues like stem cell research, which can only be good for us all, because if you look at it, the leading edge baby-boomers are now, what, 58, just look at clinton, he is recovering from his heart operation, a lot of aging processes are driven by genetics, which, after all, is genetic programs (dna) operating in your cells, so understanding how the "small computers" and other mechanisms in our cells operate and how we can modify them, and in the future, how we can build our own cells from scratch, we can reverse aging and get true indefinite longevity. Countries like china and india have stated that they will be world leaders, after all, it took japan about 35 years to go from crappy car technology (1968 era) to the superpower it is today, so we will have to stop wasting, what, 200 billion on wars in iraq, and start spending this money on fuuture technologies like nano and biotech, for the future is life extention, just look at the massive market out there, there are billions of people with a lot of money who do not what to get old, and countries that develop this technology will become the next world superpowers (biot/nano will be what the PC revolution was to silicon valley and the US economy of the late 70's, 80's and 90's), to develop these new technologies requires brainpower and both china and india have much more potential brainpower that for instance, the US has.
Seriously I'm registered for years, have never gotten any spam from this registration and if you don't want to register head over to google or wait for the reg free link which *will* appear within 10min.
If a free painless registration is the price it takes for NYT to keep the niveau and the sheer amount of free stuff on their homepage I'm willing to pay it.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Here's the rest of the story. One of those multinationals listed bought my company three years ago. Then last year they started bragging up their Asia division, and hinting that we were the bad guys because we weren't coming out with innovative products like they were. Well we finally got one of those "innovative" products in the shop and started poking into it. Turns out it was essentially *OUR* old product with a new skin!
I've got nothing against my company lowballing itself, but it really pisses me off that they're insulting the goose the laid their golden eggs.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
...and in other news, the USSR surpassed the US in aerospace science and technology in the 1950s with the launch of Sputnik. Experts predict that the Soviet emphasis on technical education and its outstanding ability to centrally marshal resources to a purpose mean grave times ahead for the US.
Five decades later, where would you rather be living? The former Soviet Union, or the US?
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
No the U.S. is not the center of the universe but we are certainly the center of the population that inhabits this earth. Our diversity is our strength and you dramatically and astoundingly underestimate it.
Also, where do you get off saying the country always bullies everyone? Last I checked we waited until Pearl Harbor to get involved with WW2. Yes there are examples that support your conclusion but the fact that in the average American donates more to charity than the average citizen of any other country.Also, by definition the United States is worldly. Our citizens come from every country on this earth.
Disclaimer: I'm not an economist, and I think economics is boring as hell. Real economists, please correct any of the points I screw up.
For those of us over 20 years old, you might remember another Asian economy that was steamrolling us. Everyone was complaining that the US was really going under this time, and fingers were pointing at all our shortcomings compared to that economy.
They've figured out a way to repeal or circumvent Adam Smith's laws. Our education isn't good enough. We work harder, not smarter. We don't work hard enough. We watch too much useless TV. We don't appreciate the power of multimedia. We aren't an ancient enough culture to appreciate the strategy of business. We're buying too many of the other country's products. We're selling too much of our real estate. We aren't pragmatic enough to give up drugs/religion/sexual habits/hobbies/music that holds us back.
Does anyone remember this attitude? I seem to recall people saying this about Japan when I was a kid. Anyone remember those guys? They're still recovering from an economic slowdown that lasted about 15 years. But they were pretty worrying at the time. They were an economic bogeyman -- Better work harder, or the Japanese will 0wn us. I recall a sarcastic commentator on some of the pushes for diversity education, "Diversity training is essential for the global marketplace. We've got to push for understanding and appreciation of other cultures. So we can beat hell out of the Japs."
I'm mentioning this because I see people in the thread saying all the same stuff we used to say about the Japanese. "There's nothing we can compete against them in. It's because we're conservative (it would be 'liberal' if Slashdot didn't lean to the left). It's because we're lazy." This attitude is not surprising; it's natural to assume that something that seems huge today is going to be even bigger in the future. It's why all William Gibson's futuristic books imagine a world dominated by zaibatsu.
Although I do believe that software patents, draconian laws regarding intellectual property, weird political bans on scientific research, etc are going to hurt us in several ways, I have trouble believing the extent of the gloomy scenarios imagined by Slashdotters here simply because I've lived through at least one of them. Really, all of us have lived through another, opposite one: The dot-com era. Remember how everyone was saying "It's the new economy! Everyone is making millions from web design and advertising! We're all going to keep getting richer, forever!" This, too, is a result of basing tomorrow's predictions on a literal interpretation of today's economic climate.
I'm sure China will end up dominating one or another sections of the market, and I'm sure a lot of blue-collar workers (such as call-center workers; they may have been "support engineers" here in the dot-bomb age, but let's face it, they're no more engineers than 1920s Ford factory workers) will be displaced. This happened the last time an Asian country figured largely in our economy. But most of the posts here rely on 1. The fallacy that economics is a zero-sum game, and 2. The assumption that we've got absolutely nothing to offer because China can manufacture many products more cheaply. Personally, I suspect that a glut will occur on some of these items (just how many curtain rods do you need, anyway?), and the laws of supply and demand will assert themselves.
The Japanese weren't magicians. They hadn't beaten supply and demand any more than anyone else. They make some great products, dominate in several fields, but they aren't going to make a world empire. I think, in time, history will show that the Chinese aren't any better magicians than the rest of us.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
What is happening is China is growing strong off of us. It's like a parasite, its sapping our current power to feed its own. The big shift your thinking about? That will be the end, when China no longer needs us and drops us like a hot potato. Just look at the currencies - if the chinese ever decide to stop tying their currency to the dollar and instead decides to fly on their own, our currency will plummet and theirs will skyrocket. They are in a much better economic position than we are. Much better and it will only get better as time progresses. So why don't they drop us? Because they still need us. A lot of people have fooled themselves into thinking that they will always need us. They can't imagine a global economic model were we are not the center of the universe. Right now, we are the only market capable of absorbing the amount of goods China wants to sell. That's all we are to the chinese: customers. We aren't business partners, I don't understand why people can't get that through their skulls. There was a time when china's economy was dependent on what we did. In five years, that will no longer be the case. In five years, their economy will be the one in control. Yet our politicians have fooled themselves into thinking we will always be the dominant economy (even as it shifts towards China). In 1996 my global studies teacher said that when China awoke as an industrial power, watch out because unless we were real careful we wouldn't even stand a chance of competeing with them. We have elected people that not only don't realize the extent of the problem, they refuse to acept the problem even exists. I know its cliched to say so but there is a parrellel here with ancient Rome in one respect. The ancient Romans believed that Rome was invincible and eternal. They were sure of it. When Alaric and the goths sacked Rome in the 300's AD, it almost caused the collapse of their society. Now 1700 years later, we find ourselves in a similiar situation. Everyone thinks the US is invincible and eternal. I can't wait till the chinese prove us wrong, this time not through military actions but economic conquest. Its funny really, we invented economic imperialism (the concept that if you control a country's economy, you in effect control the country without ever having to put a man on the ground.) Now we find the chinese using our own tactics against us.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
price growth MUST BE at zero or the economy will eventually be unsustainable
"Free-market" does not imply sustainability.