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China's Superior Technologies
paRcat writes "Still think China is a land too far away from everything? This article compares some of China's common uses of technology to what we're accustomed to in the West. With the genius traffic lights and the cell phone coverage... I'm kinda jealous."
A lot of these items were not technology related. Slipcovers for coats and purses @ resturants? Nice, but I'm not counting that as points to superior technology. Gotta admit that stoplight timer technology sounds good.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Almost every developing nation has a higher rate of cell-phone coverage than the US (and many other "western" nations.)
The Bell System and the various state-owned monopolies built reliable, universal landline networks across these countries almost a century ago. Since the majority of the infrastructure has already been made and paid off decades ago, use of these networks today is commonplace (and very affordable.) The technology is often proven, well tested, and reliable (often regulated.) Cell phones, on the other hand, are more expensive and less reliable.
In developing nations, the landline systems are often unreliable and not much cheaper (if at all) than mobile systems. Users in these countries have every reason to invest in mobile phones. I wonder if this will continue to be the case with the deployment of VoIP systems.
I was a bit disappointed with these ten points. I live in Sweden and compared to our standards this list isn't that impressive. Our mobilephones work everywhere and they cost you 10 cents to buy (honestly!). We have computer seating maps in the theaters and movie theaters. And parking signs contain the number of free spaces.
Sure, we don't have everything on the list though. I'd love to have those intelligent stop lights for instance.
I guess the bottom line is that Canada is pretty far behind.
What about Western Europe? There is much more existing infrastructure in the Western European countries than in the U.S. However, they also seem to embrace technology faster than the U.S. I feel it is due to population density. The U.S. has a low population density. The denser the population the greater your market in a particular area. No surprise that technology hits those types of markets sooner than later.
Another topic where half the posts will be comments that contain nothing but jingoism and nationalist comments rather than examine China's genuine potential for growth.
Remember people, this is the world's biggest nation (by population), with the real potential to be the world's biggest manufacturer and the world's biggest marketplace. And, remember, that that potential is starting to be realised: China already has a import surplus of billions with most Western countries, including the US, and China is now starting to become a real consumer culture in its own right.
They may have given everyone else a head-start but then so did Japan and Germany post-WWII, and look at how powerful their economies have become.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
You can't drink the water from the tap
Hocking loogies in public seems to be a national pastime
Air pollution so bad that on some days it looks foggy
Diseases like malaria and dengue fever (more a 3rd world than 1st world problem)
China may have cool tech, but the basic infrastructure sucks.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
China a "modern country"?
)
With a "government for the people"?
Hello? Is there anybody home?
In China you get into jail for saying what you think. People are imprisoned and tortured. Human rights violated. How much a nerd does one need to be in order to trade cellphone coverage for freedom?
(Amnesty International's report on China is worth a read: http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/chn-summary-eng
I'll take my basic freedoms and liberty any day over technology.
Seriously. Don't you think there's a cost to all this? Do you really think a republic like the US could do something like this?
The fact is -- it would be easier for us to modernize Iraq than it would be to modernize the US. Authoritarian control makes everything a ton easier for the government at the expense of the people.
Pick your poison.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I was in China earlier this summer and despite their "genius traffic lights" and cellphone coverage, you can still walk behind the internet bars and savvy shopping marts and find dirt roads, people living on other's garbage and sewage in the streets.
The modernization of Chinese technology is less important than the quality of life of its people. In my opinion, they need to focus less on getting every single person in their country internet and more on getting every single person in their country fed and clean.
Who moderates this stuff? China and Europe have personal residences and restaraunts older than your counry. Boston's a swaddling baby compared to them.
Thanks for the false dilemma. Either we accept corporate hegemony and end-times theocracy or we accept godless Communism? How about freedom, which resembles neither?
"Let a thousand flowers bloom," is an interesting quote. This comment was made by Chairman Mao in the 1970's to see who really opposed his policies by letting everyine express themselves. There was a period of free speech and outpourings of democratic writings, especially on college Campuses, that was followed by brutal repression and jailings of many university students and professors when Mao felt like it had run it's course.
"Let a thousand flowers bloom," was more or less a political tactic by Mao to exterminate his enemies in the Communist Party. Not sure what this has to do with economic policy and such.
abu-gharaib.
We even export our human rights violations.
Amnesty International's report on the USA is worth a read as well: http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/usa-summary-eng
The one thing I like about Japan's stagnation is that there is no poverty there. It is amazing that in a country as rich as the USA, 12% of the people there live in poverty. Guess what, that is the same as in China.
In USA when the economy suffers, it is mostly the poor on whom it is taken out on. They lose insurance, they lose their jobs and so on. In Japan, they stop growing but guess what, they are not really sweating it. They value different things. Americans value riches and expensive cars. The Japanese actually do get by with Toyotas. Witness how the Lexus brand ws only recently introduced in Japan after being in USA and Europe for the past 20 odd years. And it is owned wholly by a Japanese company. Because the Japanese do not have such big brand mentality, they will be buy a Toyota for the equivalent of $80,000. Americans will have none of that.
USAs GPD per Capita is inflated by the very rich. Japan has one of the smallest, if not the smallest Gini coefficients in the world. There is much more even wealth distribution than in USA. The USA is a country full of individuals, but Japan is more of a community.
In many ways Japan is far ahead of the USA. They still produce higher quality goods than USA and indeed just about every other country.
Very few Americans know much at all about China.
People THINK they do but to someone like me (i.e. a white guy who spends months at a time each year in China, is married to a Chinese woman, is well versed in China's history both recent and ancient and speaks Mandarin), listening to American folks discuss China is almost always very frustrating.
The country is not nearly as oppressive as some of you seem to think. Communism is really just a WORD over there... not an ideology... not anymore. Yes the government has it's problems and for the most part are not too well liked but daily life in China (well, for city dwelling, college educated people anyway) is little different from life here. People own pets, they don't eat them, they have cars, cell phones, high speed internet, live (and thus, not so controlled by the government) news on TV, they go shopping, walk in the park, meet friends for coffee, hit the clubs on Friday and Saturday night or go see a soccer match, whatever.
Many places in China would strike the most ardent neo-conservative as the very height of capitalism. Contrary to what one person posted you CAN talk about/criticise/make fun of the government. I have talked with so very many Chinese about their government and they are usually quite frank. No one is hiding behind their hand whispering, no one is "disappeared". Last time I was there (May-August 2004) there were even some fairly large labor protests in a nortern city. Protests that were not crushed, put down, blocked. We just don't hear about this sort of stuff in the states. Viewed objectively (my wife, a professor of communications, has done much research in the area of media coverage between China and the USA), our government's opinions regarding China, the average citizens beliefs on China and the stories we get about China from our media leave us with a general impression that is, quite simply, wrong and negatively biased.Statistically about equal to the bias you would find in the Chinese press about the USA.
Technologically, China IS rapidly pulling ahead of the U.S.A. in many areas (cell phone technology and IT in particular) and China has it's "Microsofts" waiting in the wings eyeing the world market (the Lenovo Group (formerly known as Legend Group) in particular). Bottom line is, most Americans don't know enough about China to make any sort of accurate commentary regarding it. Yes there are many problems in China and with it's government but it is much closer to life here (once again, in the cities, not the countryside) than you probably think.