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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.'"
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...?
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
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."
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!
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.
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).
The problem, and the reason why so many Americans are worried about all this, is that this is not a competition we will win, and we already know it.
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,
And why do you think that? The religious right takes the positions it does because of irrational religious beliefs (when was religion ever based on rationality?). They don't care if the USA turns into a biotech backwater; all that matters is that they're "right", and that they can push their morality on the rest of us. You don't see the Islamic fundamentalists trying to turn their countries and regions into world-class high-tech hubs; they want to impose strict religious law (which includes stoning women to death if they allow their arm to be seen outside their bourqa) on everyone under their control, even if that means turning those places into societies with less technology than the Ancient Greeks had.
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,
And what makes you think this is going to happen? Americans are happy to spend billions on wars with no justification. From the latest polls I've seen, it looks like Bush is going to win the next election, so that means a majority of Americans approve of his actions in Iraq. Sure, there's a huge market out there in the nanotech and biotech fields, but there's other countries out there that are probably going to be the ones to capitalize on them, not the US.
to develop these new technologies requires brainpower and both china and india have much more potential brainpower that for instance, the US has.
Yep, and our kids are being failed by our pathetic education system, and the smart ones that get to college are staying the hell away from the tech fields, for good reason: there's much better (more stable, better paying) careers out there, which you don't have to worry about being offshored.
The fact is, the USA is going downhill very fast. The downfall of the tech industries is just the start; pretty soon, other countries will realize that we just don't have anything to offer them, since they'll have all the technology, manufacturing capacity, etc. The only thing we'll have is silly IP laws that let companies patent things like 1-click shopping. Our economy is based on a house of cards, and pretty soon everyone else is going to stop believing in the things that allow the US to keep its house of cards propped up. The best thing to do is to plan for the collapse.
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.
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