Slashdot Mirror
China PM Wants to Rule Global Tech With India
GrumpyDeveloper writes "As reported in this Wired story, China's prime minister said Sunday that China and India should work together to dominate the world's tech industry, bringing together Chinese hardware with Indian software.
Despite China's usage of FOSS, they're the only people I trust less than MS. Today's software overlords, the US + EU, is bad enough with managing things like privacy and fair use.
China's management of the internet ought to give us some idea of what they would do with a monopoly on internet tech.
Premiere of China and the President of India are Scientists, one a down to earth Geologist and the other a rocket shooting Space scientist!
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About the topic
Could Chinese Hardware & Indian Software be married to produce the World dominating Tech Industry? Is it a mere whimsical dream of the Chinese Premiere or is it a real workable proposition to tilt the balance of the World's technological power base? As the wise sage said "Time will tell"!
Curretly though, the traditional rivals are ready to bury the hatchet over the common border they share and also have set a target to raise the bilateral trade to $30bn by 2010 from the $13.6bn in the last fiscal. The two countried have signed a dozen agreements today, ranging from phytosanitary protocols to more open skies, and China is backing India's bid to the UN Security Council.
So for the time being, they do seem to be working together to the mutual benefit of the two Asian behemoths. Also, if the friction is diffused the world has one pair of nuclear neighbours to worry about!
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
China has a long way to go towards enabling personal freedoms before this will work. China may have the high tech labor force but the specifications are still being written in the United States. This will not change until the centralized Chinese communist system allows decentralized freedom and entreprenuership. The Chinese system of a huge labor force and relatively few real leaders will not scale to the level of decision making and innovation that a system based on respect for dissent and personal freedom will. China needs more leaders to make this work and their current system fears that level of power sharing.
In the very short term it's great for consumers because prices are low. However, in the medium term, a slew of jobs will be deprecated in non-Indo-Chinese nations as the industries relocate. This will cause all sorts of economic and political headache as people will fight the change with tariffs, stressing the system which will then snap nastily when all local demand will vanish and companies go belly-up. Those folks who have enough foresight will work to develop new industries that provide the higher value required to support "western" wages. So, eventually things will shift again.
This is simply the economic cycle on a global scale instead of many small local ones; when any area gets an advantage, wealth shifts there for a while, but it will eventually shift somewhere else again (maybe South America? who knows...)
Savings are only great, also, if people use those savings to save and hedge against disruptions, not if they use it to buy more expensive luxury items and to improve education to better cope with change.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Incoming: 300 alarmist responses about how India and China and the rest of the Asian Tigers are going to own everything / run everything in 10 or 50 years, because they work so much harder than us.
Funny thing. 20 years ago it was the Japanese who were going to "own everything". It's actually funny (in a tragic sort of way) to watch movies from the 80's and early 90's, with their dire predictions of our impending Japanese Overlords. For a good laugh, go rent "Rising Sun" or even the Micheal Keaton comedy "Gung Ho".
In reality, Japan is slowly dragging itself out of a recession which has spanned decades due to the inept bungling of the bureaucratic masterminds who were supposedly going to guide Japan to a peaceful takeover of the world's economy. Heck, I even drive a Honda: it was made in Kentucky.
If you honestly think that China and India are going to surpass the West through the magical power of Central Planning, you haven't been paid much attention for the past 100 years or so.
Incoming: Hundreds of slashdotters raving about how hard Indians and Chinese work in school (quietly ignoring the vast majority who live in rural areas). Big deal. It didn't help the Soviets, did it?
China isn't going to be a frist-world country as long as their central government insists on tightly controlling the most important aspects of their economy. India is better off in this regard, but as an imperfect democracy I see them as a potential ally, not a rival. Indeed, the Bush administration is cozying up to democratic India specifically as a foil to totalitarian China. Smart move.
Most people even on slashdot are profoundly igrnorant of economics. For example, they routinely assume that economics is a zero-sum game. If that were true, we'd still be living in caves.
Have you actually tried to LOOK FOR American product in the shelves of your local stores LATELY?
It's a farce that Toyota while classified as an "import" could boasted that their cars (manufactured in the United States) contained MORE American manufactured components than American branded cars.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?