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Effects of China's Software Policy on World Economy?
guptaparesh asks: "The Chinese government is currently engaged in a comprehensive overhaul of its procurement policies and regulations. These regulations would ban non-Chinese firms from selling software to the Chinese government. Given that how much trade all the countries in the world are engaged in with China, isn't this a unfair trade move by the Chinese government?" A better question would be how this might affect the worldwide economy, particularly that of the U.S. and China. What benefits and drawbacks may China see as a result of this new policy? What steps might the U.S. take to attempt to counter it?
No problem for guys the size of IBM, who can simply create bizzare chimeras with guys like Lenovo to produce things that are Chinese and US companies at the same time.
How the U.S. can counter it?
Simple, the U.S. government should refuse to buy software from Chinese companies.
(I pity anyone that mods this insightful)
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
We could... force 'em to um... only buy Microsoft stuff. That would teach 'em!
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Didn't they start making their own Linux Distro.. maybe they are doing this to force consumers and goverment bodies to use their software instead of anything else.. Sounds like they are using a Microsoft tactic.. only instead of Embrace and Extend it is Embargo and Extend.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
It's kind of funny to see the US squirm now that the shoe is on the other foot. Suck it back guys, and reap all the goodwill you've earned. I guess you can tell I'm a bit bitter on how the US ignores NAFTA rules when it suits them, and (illegally) wrecks other countries economies to improve their own. Hell the USA can't even follow the treaties it does sign. /schadenfreude
These regulations would ban non-Chinese firms from selling software to the Chinese government.
So whats to stop US companies from opening 'chinese' companies?
air and light and time and space
Last time I was in China, I visited one of their top universities (SJTU) and they were selling versions of Windows that did not appear to be legal in stores on campus. So this probably won't affect them very much since they don't buy software anyway.
What steps might the U.S. take to attempt to counter it?
Uh, none? It isn't any of the U.S.'s business... literally!
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I didn't realize the Chinese Government had such a big slice of the software economic pie. Remember, this is just bans other countries from selling software to the Goverment, not the whole country.
The Digital Couture Collection
In principle, this is bad. This is protectionism, and protectionism is a Bad Thing.
In practice, how bad this is depends on the details. Specifically, can a business get away with just having a Chinese subsidiary? And if that subsidiary can be in Hong Kong, many companies are already positioned to meet this requirement.
China is not an undeveloped nation, it is a superpower nation. Why do you think the US kisses China Butt all the time, and lets so much stuff slip that would cause other nations to be whiped out. over 2 billion people. about 1/3 of the world population is in China.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"isn't this a (sic) unfair trade move by the Chinese government"
No. They are just creating a policy for how government buys software. They aren't disallowing any Chinese businesses or people from buying US or other software. I can't see how this affects the economy at all. The Chinese government big enough.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
It makes a hell of a differents, because the chineese will no longer (if they decide to use linux) use non free formats and generations of chineese will not grow up accostumed to MS software, but to linux.
Freedom or George Bush
Did China revert into an undeveloped nation without someone telling me?? I didn't know an undeveloped nation could have the best economy on the planet!
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How about a ban by the Chinese government on Chinese firms selling non-Chinese software to all the countries in the world?
It's a Chinese national security issue. The CCP does not trust software outside of it's own country for fear of hidden backdoors. They think Microsoft may have had the Pentagon place backdoors into Windows to be used in times of war.
Life is not for the lazy.
How many s/ws manifactured by US firms have true internationalization support ?
Besides the ban would be only for selling s/w to the Govt, not the 1.3+ Billion consumers.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
What steps might the U.S. take to attempt to counter it? We could stop buying Chinese textiles, for one.
a Government wanting to limit the software it depends on to the companies it has the most control over and best access to? If a country relies on a foreign written and supported software, who knows what problems arise. Unless you are in the business of making software, you better be able to trust who you're in bed with to provide it, because you are less likely to know what coded inside.
Max: "You mind if I drive?" Sam: "Not if you don't mind me clawing at the dash and screeching like a cheerleader."
A friend of mine regularly chimes in that we have nothing to worry about from China because "...there is no way a nation that still has cases of Bubonic Plague and can't put electricity or roads across its entire landmass could possibly challenge US Superiority in what we do best..."
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
A "Not Invented Here" syndrome for software is very good for national security, as the Soviet Union learned the hard way
China keeps giving themselvs huge rubs on the back and anyone who tries to move in on it gets a kick in the groin.
This is exactly the same as every other country (look who gets all the contracts in Iraq for example), the only "real" difference is we all know "china is evil" and America/Europe/Whatever you like near the Atlantic is "good" and "helping the industry".
So China's doing nothing different from anyone else. If anything being "shut in" may even help Linux if Microsoft piss off the wrong government member.
I like muppets.
Imagine respecting international trade laws! Kind of a stretch, given a mafia government that respects nothing but power, and the money that flows from it.
Are you talking about the US or Chinese?
There is a perfectly logical reason a government should only buy from it's companies of it's nationality. In fact, all governemnts should do this, including the US.
By requiring that the companies you do business with be in your own jurisdiction, you are essentially keeping the money "in house" and keeping the jobs "in house" as well. The state of Indiana recently (last eyar or so) had a bill for this (not sure if it got passed or not). What it essentially does is increase the jobs and keep all money in state. For a federal governent to do it, it keeps the money in the country.
Makes perfect sense for a variety of reasons to do this.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
over 2 billion people
Small nit to pick. China doesnt have over 2 billion. From CIA worldfact book its 1,306,313,812.
Otherwise... right on brother ! Im learning Manadrin .
Best growth rate of any large nation, but not the "best economy". It's GDP is only half the size of ours, despite having four times the population. It's growth rate is fast, but not the fastest - Equatorial Guinea is predicted to grow at 16% this year (compared to China's predicted 8%), and I'd hardly call them "the best economy on the planet" (tied for second is one of the poorest contries in the world - Chad, at 14%).
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
China is a huge trade manipulator (if not the biggest in the world). However, lets not pretend that we're innocent here, with our monstrous ag. subsidies. Furthermore, we violated the same rule we're now faulting China for in Iraq (only allowing bidding from COW countries; all government bidding on non-sensitive projects, by WTO rules, is to be open to any country)
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
They can and will, but the Honorable Tom Davis says:
In a lawless land, the law is not much of a problem. The first one is easy to get around by selling to a vendor. The second one stops you cold, until you remember that China is as corrupt as all hell. Those with power will continue to do exactly as they please.
They could and should, of course, do completely without US commercial software. There are more than enough free software alternatives which can be "developed" by recompile in China. A totalitarian state ironically can have much better control of their IT if they are the root user of their own free software. No government, including the US government, should tolerate a third party owning their IT infrastructure the way US commercial software vendors demand.
How will this change the world economy? Not at all! The whole "engagement" deal Bill Clinton came up with was a pipe dream. China's leaders have made themselves rich of US and European trade by making slaves of their own people. Leaders who screw their own people like that will surely screw everyone else if they can. There are no surprises here, except to those dumb and immoral enough to do business with and invest in communist China.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Why should the US do ANYTHING to counter what China is doing? Are you americans so myopic that you think protectionism ONLY works, and is ok, JUST for you americans? Good god. The world existed before 1776, and will exist once the americans implode. And the sooner the better for the rest of the world.
Microsoft will just use/create/buy a chinese company as a front to sell their products through.
That's understandable. Knowing our fearless leader, he might declare that the terrorists are now coming from China, or have put their base of ops in China. The Chinese, having the Confucianism insight to forsee this, might wish to protect themselves. I can see it now, Dubya conquering China and holding up an "All your tellolists are berong to us." banner.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Riiight. And thats why China can run over their students with tanks, disappear and torture dissidents, censor the internet, and STILL have a valued trading partner status with the US?
China is everything Saddam was, PLUS they have REAL weapons of mass destruction, not just imaginary ones photoshopped into satellite photos. We blast the shit out of Iraq, but if we even thought of pulling the american mouth away from China's ass, China would cut all the trade lines and let America's economy wither. Hell, the damage to Wal-Mart alone would be an economic disaster. How can they keep their low prices without cheap shit made in China?
John Snow (the U.S. Treasury Secretary) fired a warning shot [iht.com] at China's currency fixing policies. Intellectual properties concerns, and trade issues like the one cited in TFA are also commonly voiced from the adminstration.
But with the trade deficit with China and budget deficit being funded by China, China is the one who holds the best cards in the coming tradewar that recent headlines hint at.
If China stops buying US bonds, or floods the market with what they already own, the US economy is screwed.
I think it is kinda funny that John Snow is making demands to China after getting so many loans from the Bank of China.
If I am going to bring legal action against someone, I am not going to go borrow money from them first - especially if I can't pay it back.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration are the latter type of Republicans. (I'm not saying the Democrats are any better - they just have different friends and different special interests. The last good Republican President we had was Bill Clinton, and before him, well, we didn't elect Goldwater
So the Bush Administration may do something protectionist as retaliation, damaging more American businesses, or they may just give a bunch of speeches and not actually do anything. If we're lucky it'll be the latter.
Meanwhile, China's government have been pretty crazy, trying to pretend that they're preserving the benefits of Communist central planning and limited amounts of political repression while becoming corrupt capitalists in practice - but they're mostly Not Stupid about where the money's coming from. So yes, big foreign businesses will be able to set up Chinese subsidiaries or joint ventures to sell to the government as long as somebody's nephew or brother-in-law gets to run them. And small foreign businesses will be able to sell to Chinese wholesalers, or maybe sell their products as OEM to Chinese companies that will add value by localization.
Microsoft and Oracle probably already have Chinese "partners", or else they'll set them up, and there are Linux distributions developed in China, and possibly other Linux commercial distributors can get Chinese companies to do documentation and packaging for them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I work for a U.S. government contractor. One of the rules that we have to comply with is that all of our software must be produced in the united states. We can't use open source code because some of it could be written outside of the US. We can't buy licenses for software libraries that could be produced overseas. It's to protect us from potentially malicious code.
This articles prevents the Chinese Government from buying software from outside of the country. There's still another 1.3 billion consumers there that don't directly work for the government. I don't see this to be a very big problem for US companies trying to sell products there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are plenty of things the US government will only purchase from US companies. If a country has no trade tarrifs or subsidies, their markets are open. You wouldn't advocate forcing corporations to purchase from foreign firms, why should governments be forced to? If the Chinese government doesn't want to purchase things from other countries, that is their right. If they start saying that no one can purchase things from other countries, then you can start invoking trade laws.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Bill Gates will just buy China and turn it into his summer home.
True enough. Have a look at credit card debt. The jobs are leaving, but the expenses are staying high. Creditors carry very little risk any longer (especially since the signing of the bankruptcy bill). Predatory lending is a great way to bilk those people that use their credit cards for necessary expenses such as medical care.
Most of those laid off get new jobs at reduced wages. The middle class will consume as they are told no matter what their income is. So long as they do, the outsourcing game of 3-card monte will always benefit them.
They don't need to do anything... who's going to sue the chinese government??? GPL doesn't mean squat to them.
Of course it's accurate. They used Diebold machines to count the census!
The US is a terrible market abuser, too. We're coddling Microsoft, for example, which even our own government has declared a monopoly abuser. The problem is that the "us vs them" here isn't "China vs US", but "corporate governments vs people".
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make install -not war
And you're clueless.
Years ago Microsoft has given the Chinese government access to the complete source code of Windows operating systems.
And the Chinese are not the only government who has access to the Windows source code.
And you have the nerve to call the grandparent "clueless?"
Ignoring the whole NSAKey fracas from a few years back (that would be too easy) exactly why do you think Microsoft has given China--or anyone else, for the matter--the "complete" source code to Windows? My understanding is that no one outside of Microsoft has the capability to build the software (and even MS has a difficult time there) so how do you know the source anyone has been given matches the binaries? Inserting (and masking) any backdoors would be fairly trivial.
It's also absurd to think that an American company wouldn't take such an action if asked/ordered to by the government--ANY company in ANY country would do so if their respective governments came calling.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
This pertains particularly to discussions within the U.S. about the direction of our economy.
As more and more manufacturing jobs, and lower end service jobs (New York City parking tickets processed in India?!) have moved abroad, the continued argument, particularly from those fostering and benefiting from the outsourcing, has been that the U.S. will become *the* place for high tech, high value jobs. We'll "lead the world" in this regard, or some such.
What was obvious to some is now becoming apparent in the general media. There's nothing special about these "high end" jobs that requires they be done here. Nothing other than our legal system and established tradition of rights and responsibilities particularly with regard to contract law.
As other societies advance, there's no reason for them to hire our services, at our significantly higher cost, when they have native talent or talent accessible in other countries that is equally well educated and equally capable.
Other societies have been busy building up that talent, and they are attempting to address the legal concerns. We're getting closer to the tipping point, where the U.S. becomes largely obsolete.
Largely obsolete, except for a lot of warships, planes, and nuclear warheads. Beware: That way lies overt fascism.
How should we counter it? Do nothing! No, really. Think about this. What it means is that China is limiting the population of people who can supply stuff to their government. When supply goes down, the price goes up. China is punishing themselves. We don't need to do anything. The absolutely dumbest thing we could do is "retaliate" by deciding to limit our own supply (e.g. establishing a reciprical trade rule).
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Why complain about these things when America already does something similar? Perhaps Americans would like to demonstrate a huge open market by letting more foreign companys bid for defence contracts. I don't think the likes of Boeing or Lockheed Martin will do well with real competition though, will they?
over 2 billion people. about 1/3 of the world population is in China.
o stpopulous.htm
Ahem, you meant in China and India combined, didn't you? Both have about 1 billion populaion.
http://geography.about.com/cs/worldpopulation/a/m
That's very interesting because: a) they've artificially pegged the yuan-to-U.S.-dollar exchange rate at 8.2765 .78 Euros...
b) the U.S dollar has been dropping substantially in value in comparison to many other major currencies, over the last 4 years. In May 2001, it took about 1.14 Euros to buy 1 US dollar; now it takes about
The dollar's been rising lately though. At the beginning of the year, it only took .76 Euros to buy a dollar.
Assuming China's currency really is undervalued, because they're tied to the dollar at a fixed rate, then the US dollar is overvalued (or another currency tied to the dollar is). I'd guess that if China lets their currency float, then in theory the dollar (or the dollar and that other currency) will fall even more, which will make our exports cheaper to the rest of the world and make our imports (including spot market oil) more expensive.
Many people (often reported as "thousands"; the NSA (US) estimate was 180-500) were killed at Tiananmen Square (including a few dozen to several hundred security forces, whose entry was actively resisted - again, numbers differ by whose estimate you look at), but none were reported to have been "run over by tanks". That's a popular misconception because of the famous "tank guy" photos and videos; there actually was a long standoff between the man and the tank, which ended when the man actually climbed *on* the tank to try and talk to those inside, which caused worried onlookers to grab him and haul him off into the crowd.
To be fair to the Chinese, we haven't had such a massive riot in the US in a time when security forces were on edge. Our closest "equivalent" was Kent State; a similar percentage of people were killed in comparison to the size of the crowd and number of troops, but the numbers at Kent State was a tiny fraction of that in China. The Tiananmen square protests involved over a million people at its height, and perhaps another million or more in other cities in China (no loss of life was reported in the dispersal of the other protests).
China certainly has real WMDs, but not many of them; FAS puts the total at around 80 warheads, and only about a dozen ICBMs (compared to thousands in the US).
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
1. Closing off government software contracts to foreign firms isn't protectionism. It's common sense if you have any real concern about information security.
2. This is a few hundred million dollars worth of contracts at best. It will have virtually no impact on the world software industry.
3. China has a frozen currency. They are not interested in fair trade. "China has long maintained a fixed exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar, providing an indirect subsidy to help maintain its high-growth economy. Such currency control gives Chinese exports a 15 percent to 40 percent price advantage on global markets. That antimarket policy also discourages exports of American goods and services to China." --CSM. Of course this strategy is not without trade-offs, China runs the risk of sudden and severe inflation by pegging its currency artificially.
4. All of you anti-American, anti-capitalist, pseudo-intellectual nitwits are stunningly ignorant, yet refreshingly smug. Trying to decide whether your ignorance is the result of selective learning, indoctrination, or just sheer lack of cranial capacity could be an amusing pastime for one with a much stronger stomach than mine.
Thank you for your attention. You may fire at will.
In these situations (and software is obviously such a situation), only one company, one country, wins the race. And the winner doesn't necessarily match up with the country that had the classical comparative advantage. It matches up with the country that, at a given point in time, happened to be producing more than the other.
If in fact a country does have the classical comparative advantage, then it can improve their welfare (indeed, world welfare) if they close their borders, allowing that industry to grow. Once the industry has grown, capitalizing on the increasing returns to scale, you can open up your markets and take down the producers in the other country.
So there's an argument for doing it. But, it should be noted that even though Krugman pioneered justifications for protectionism, he remains an ardent supporter of free trade. There are a number of reasons for that, but in this context, the biggest problem is that a country doesn't know, and can't know, if in fact it has a classical comparative advantage in this product. In other words, it doesn't know that there will ever be a time when it can successfully open its borders. In this case, the country (and the world) are worse off.
Further, the act of closing your borders, even if good in the long run, still has costs in the short run. Not only do you need to be sure that you can ultimately take over the market, but you need to be sure that the long run gains are sufficiently high to warrant the short run costs. In the end, protectionist policies simply aren't worth the risk.
Oh, BTW, one country's trade policies, even a country like China, doesn't have that much to do with the trade deficit. If China stopped exporting to us entirely, the trade deficit might drop initially, but it would come back up as we increase imports from other countries. Ultimately, the trade deficit is driven by our national savings rate.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
I would actually think it's an economic decision. Unlike more tangible products, software can be made anywhere. The money the Chinese government hands over goes directly into the foreign economy.
On the other hand, if it goes to a Chinese software company (or company based in China), the money spent on the software will go to local employees, who will spend it buying local groceries, etc. Lots of Chinese citizens get income from that one government expenditure, i.e. the multiplier effect.
OTOH, while I can undertand a preference for Chinese companies, a blanket policy banning foreign companies seems a bit silly, considering the maturity of the Chinese industry. Extra consideration for being local, but still looking at one's needs, seems more appropriate.
First, this is not a trade issue and the US will do nothing in response because no treaties or rules have been broken. This is a piece of government policy. If you go to China, you can bring Microsoft, you just can't sell it to the government. This ONLY effects the Chinese government.
Second, I have a feeling this has a lot more to do with security then building up their industry. If they are building their own code, they are a lot less likely to get stuff with backdoors build in. This isn't just paranoia either. During the first gulf war the US wiped out the Iraqi air defense network with viruses they stuffed into printers bought in the US.
That said, I have this is going to be a mixed blessing for a while. Building your own code base from scratch is really not going to be easy. Mix in the absolutely terrible accountability and management issues of the Chinese government and you are talking about a disaster waiting to happen. It isn't that China doesn't have good coders. They have good and bad coders like the US, it is more that the government is unlikely to be able to tell the difference.
Finally, if the US is going to raise a stink about trading policies, it will be over currency. Hell, just glance at the days bussiness headlines if you want an Economics 101 from the bickering back and forth.
And of course, the U.S. didn't respect international copyright for something like 100 years, until somewhere around the beginning of the 1900's. For example, everything Charles Dickens wrote was legally pirated in the U.S.
Ben Franklin was also a notable "pirate", way back when...
The rational back then was that it benefited the U.S. economy (which it did). <sarcasm>Of course, now it's just absolutely horrible when "Intellectual Property" rights aren't respected... </sarcasm>
China is finally getting around to doing in software what they have always done in industries deemed "strategic" - they force world-leading companies to share technology with Chinese partners and eventually compete against the foreigners. It works because Western businesses feel like they need exposure to China's purported "billion-person market" at any cost. Look at Boeing. Look at Cisco.
Now it's true that the economic impact in China is negligible because they don't buy software from the West at all - they steal it. And TFA quotes the USTA pathetically whining about how China is closing themselves out of the world's best software. WAKE UP, you fucking morons in the US Dept of Commerce: China wants the "best software in the world" to be made in China, not Palo Alto, not Redmond, not Bangalore, not anywhere else.
This is the first shot in a trade war aimed right at one of the few industries left where the US can honestly be said to have a technological edge.
Since the US doesn't allow export of strong encryption, people should't use any! right guys? Seriously, why China gouvenement would buy American software anyway, they want control, and they have all the control they want with existing open source solution that they can enhanced themself, with nobody looking over their shoulder. I would'nt like anyway my gouvenement to buy American software if open source alternative exist, my taxes are not suppose to pay american share holders!
The chinese definitely want to be certain that their software is not compromised. I too have heard about a proprietary fork of Linux being developed for governmental use.
The US government has taken it upon itself to depose governments it deems opposed to its own "ideals". China realizes that it falls into that category. They're looking to protect their infrastructure in two ways; first by preventing media from re-educating its youth - aka censorship. They know that's a losing battle. You can't win when the other guy offers drugs and porn on demand (the other guys would be us). Second, they're trying to preserve the integrity of their grid by obscuring its protocols.
that's a double edged sword. In my estimation, the reason the money guys have always had a problem as far as coding goes is that, for the most part, THEY CAN'T READ CODE. So even with your most loyal engineers, you ASSUME loyalty, because the bureaucrats and venture capitalists can't assure it for themselves. This is a huge hole in the CODE FOR THYSELF strategy. The coders REALLY HAVE ALL THE POWER. This leaves room for backdoors-for-hire... lots of black market cash to be made, etc... Imagine Mao telling scribes what he wanted in The Little Red Book, himself being unable to read or write. *shrugs*
(I think it's an interesting time for coding in general, because I tend to think of coders as this new underclass (undervalued by virtue of the fact that there are so many of them across regions with differing monetary systems), but literate (and thus possessing an information processing and storing advantage) to a degree that by and large supercedes the general population. Imagine the world after someone writes the Little Binary Book? Imagine, virtual populace, virtual governments - people don't tend plots of land, they tend lines of code - But I digress... )
But other than that, it makes good sense from China's perspective to eliminate the effect the United States has on its own populace and infrastructure. Increased US influence can only erode the Chinese power system; as such it should be feared and otherwise rallied against. So if I were the Chinese, I'd want Microsoft off my servers and clients too. In fact I'd want them out of my country. Nor would I want Google. Really... especially Google. Every time I think of Google these days, I think of the movie PI (by Darren Aronofsky - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/). The protagonist searched for a pattern in PI, and for a pattern in the stock market, which... all coincided with the pattern for God. Anyway, I can imagine that Google has its hands on a bundle of patterns these days. Again, I digress.
That said, you can find almost any movie on the street for like a buck. That alone would have Mao turning in his grave.
un burrito me trampeó.
While I certainly wouldn't call China undeveloped, it's most certainly not a superpower. A large economy doesn't make one a superpower alone, nor does possession of some nuclear warheads, or else India, Pakistan, and Israel would be considered superpowers. To be considered a superpower, a nation must have the ability to project its influence significantly beyond its borders, and I would argue that there is still only one nation that can do this through economic, political, diplomatic, and (if necessary) military means, and that is the United States.
This doesn't mean that other nations with significant economies cannot make themselves a real nuisance -- or worse -- on the world stage. However, those nations have more difficulty projecting themselves in other ways. For instance, China has a great deal of economic power, and has some diplomatic power in the form of its UN Security Council veto power, but has substantially less political power because there are few nations that really want to emulate China specifically, and even less military power because it has almost zero capacity to project military power much beyond its immediate neighborhood.
Other nations have different balances. India has some political power through its position as the world's largest democracy, although this is tempered somewhat by the touchy relations with its Muslim community and continued strains with Pakistan over Kashmir. It is a growing economic power, though less than China. India's military power is also rapidly growing, and its coming addition of the MiG-29 capable carrier Admiral Gorshkov, recently purchased from Russa, will provide it with a heavy naval strike capacity that its current Sea Harrier carriers lack, and put it into a class in which only the US, UK, and France currently exist. Yet it has far less diplomatic power than many of its neighbors due to a lack of a Security Council veto and due to strained relations with its neighbors.
Other nations have small militaries and economies, but wield disproportionate diplomatic and political power to their size because they are perceived as being above many of the squabbles and frays in which other nations involve themselves. But even nations like the UK aren't superpowers despite their influence over nations around the world, their powerful militaries, and strong diplomatic and political presence, because their ability to weild all of these at the same time are limited.
It's a hard thing to become a superpower-class nation long enough to get that designation, and even harder to maintain that status -- ask the Soviet Union about that.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
It is not correct to compare US agriculture subsidies to currency manipulation that undervalues ALL of China's goods up to 40%.
First off, the economic effect is orders of magnitude different. The fact that the US supplies subsidies to one small sector of their own economy does not excuse the massive subsidies China dishes out that effects their entire economy. There are plenty of economic sectors in the US that receive no subsidy.
Second off, there is a compelling national defense interest to having enough domestic food production for your entire population. Should the US be cut off from food suppliers during war time, they want to be able to have food to eat.
Certainly, China could attempt to use national security as an excuse for this action. And I could grant that as reasonable when dealing with military and high-level government systems. However, there are plenty of low-level systems that require no great deal of security. One could reasonably argue that any platform could be put in place on these systems.
It is also not correct to compare China's current actions to US actions in Iraq's contract biddings. Unlike China, the US did not limit those bids to domestic companies only. Companies from outside the country were eligible to bid, granted that they had a policy favorable to the US.
China's population is about 1.3 billion (see the CIA World Factbook on China). The United States' population is about 295 million (see same source). Therefore China is closer to 4x the US population. Interestingly, while China's one-child policy would cause a population implosion around 2050 if maintained, the U.S. may grow to 500 million if the current trends in immigration continue.
Your contention that China's effect on the world should be similar to that of the U.S. based on its middle class population has some merit, but China also is in a different economic situation. Unlike the U.S., which is a mature industrial and post-industrial economy, China is in a high growth industrialization stage and in addition is offloading industrial production from Japan and the West. Therefore their IT needs may grow faster than those of the U.S. and they may indeed achieve some sort of dominance over software standards.
Whether this is a good thing is another question. Because laws in China are drawn up by technocrats and passed by fiat, they tend to represent a top-down view of how things should work. In the U.S. and other countries, standards are set by industrial consortia based partially on collective needs and partially on who's the biggest and richest on the committee. Whichever system prevails has yet to be seen.
The Chinese view the big Western companies as "hegemonist", especially the ones headquartered in the U.S., so they tend to reflexively oppose American-developed standards. Culturally, the Chinese have always been the "central kingdom" with their own language, history, technology and science stretching back thousands of years. They therefore tend to have a "not-invented-here" rejectionist mentality toward foreign ways. This is not to say that they don't copy stuff, but they try to sinicize it as quickly as they can, to translate it and get it to feel more palatable. It's quite likely that they're more comfortable with developing their own standards that may be based on IEEE, w3.org and so forth, but they will extend on them and make them work natively. The rest of the world can either go along and accommodate them or ignore them. Either way, we are in for some interesting times.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.