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.'"

Comments

Wow, who'd have thought!

[lgordon]

Who'd have thought that slave labor would be so intellectually stimulating!

Re:Kylin and China development

[botsmaster25]

Rice Fanboy.

Worker's Paradise

[Doc Ruby]

While China climbs the tech ladder to success and power, America is climbing down into a miasma of faith and innuendo. Isn't it wierd how President Bush Sr. went from Nixon's UN ambassador to his GOP Chairman spinmaster to his China ambassador to CIA director to VP to President, then finally director of the giant multinational Carlyle Group as his son presided over the greatest transfer of wealth and power from the US to China? This will be a swell nation of bucolic christian farmers growing feasts for the Chinese mobsters running the globe, and the Bushes will have reaped a healthy reward.

Re:Is "insourcing" a word?

[j. andrew rogers]

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.

Ugh. Have you actually been to China? It is still clearly a "third world" type country, and will be for the foreseeable future. What makes you think this model scales?

If the standards of living are rising, it is only because they were so poor to begin with. Efficiency isn't such an important factor because you can buy big improvements for little money. But if you try to scale this to the standard of living of, say, Europe, you end up with a non-competitive economy because standards of living are pretty much defined by relative efficiency.

Centralized political economies do not scale well, and are not competitive at the high-end.