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China vs U.S. in an 'Internet Race'
avatar4d writes to mention an article on CIO about a new 'space race' on the internet between China and the U.S.. China is currently hard at work at what is being called the 'Chinese Next Generation Internet' (CNGI). With plans to unveil the project at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the network is part of a plan to leap ahead of the United States in innovation and technology. From the article: "The strategy, outlined in China's latest five-year plan, calls for the country to transition its economy from one based almost entirely on manufacturing to one that produces its own scientific and technological breakthroughs — using a new and improved version of today's dominant innovation platform, the Internet. 'CNGI is the culmination of this revolutionary plan' to turn China into the world's innovation capital, says Wu Hequan, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the chairman of the CNGI Expert Committee, the group overseeing the project. 'We will use it as a way to break through and be competitive in the global economic market.'"
I hear you won't be able to say anything bad about the Chinese government on this new internet; however you can get quite a deal on a Rolex and other brand name items...
Sounds great, for them at least, doesn't it? Do some basic research. Get ahead of the Americans. So you can imagine the mental double-take at this tidbit from the same article:
WHAT? China's greatest minds put together a launch and re-entry vehicle, and "officials" load it with almost 500 pounds of seeds so that they will magically become superplants? WTF? Did someone in China not get the memo that their former occupiers are not *really* developing giant robots, and that Little Shop of Horrors is a work of fiction, not a battle plan?
The article claims that China will be a country that "produces its own scientific and technological breakthroughs". Sending a truckload of seeds to come back as food for the Fantastic Four sounds more like a continuation of the tradition that brought us tiger penis, rhinoceros horn, and bear bile therapies. And here I was, worried we were losing our edge.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It's a cheap, buzzword-riddled, thirity-seven-years-behind ripoff of ARPANET.
Good to know.
I for one do not welcome our new overlords...
-American
Is this a race to deploy the first Web 3.0 app? :P
Where are they going to get all these expert scientists and researchers for this? IMO, you can't just instantly (4 years, for a country to change its entire economy is essentially instantaneous for that kind of thing) change your entire economy to become a bunch of super duper experts..
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
While I have every faith in China to leap ahead of the United States in innovation -- given the current state of affairs (the latest iteration of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Kansas, the completely pacified American public ("yeah, there was no real reason we invaded Iraq"), not to mention the state of the American national awareness (Osama was friends with Saddam!) I don't see how all the other countries in the world COULDN'T leapfrog the States!
1) Complain about US falling behind
2) blame Christian Fundamentalists and Bush
3) ????
4) Profit!!!
Right now, the Asian tech industries excel at not innovation but copying and improving upon existing designs which typically originate elsewhere. This is not just a Chinese thing -- look at the Japanese auto industry or Korean flat panel fabs, for example. It's quite a jump to magically switch your entire economy's sweet spot to one that's based on innovation -- in five years, no less -- but I think the biggest thing that the Chinese are missing out on is the *reason* for that innovation. Here in the States, tech isn't government-mandated and government-controlled, we don't fix our currency rate, and, above all else, it's possible to become very, very, VERY rich if you're successful in tech. Let's be honest -- our tech industry takes advantage of human greed (for better and for worse), something that runs contrary to communism at its core. The negative is that we let failing companies fail, jobs are lost, etc., but the positive is that there's actually a real INCENTIVE to innovate.
then get off your butt, turn off the TV and get inventing.
The only way to succeed is to build success yourself.
With plans to unveil the project at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the network is part of a plan to leap ahead of the United States in innovation and technology.
Given that ours is made of tubes, it can't be hard to come up with something better.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Shouldn't the title read "China vs U.S. in an 'Internet' Race", it's their version of the thingie afterall.
they should have hosted the article on the CNGI. It's already down for the count..
The whole idea of "race" and needing decades of experience to get in front is very archaic. You don't need to follow the full technological evolution to get there.
Besides.... China has an amazing history of technological superiority over the last couple of thousand years or so, with only the last 100 or so years (a mere 5%) being a "glitch".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So, China wants a large population of smart people, trained and able to ask fundamental questions, who won't question Party Orthodoxy.
Good luck.
One of two things will happen: Another cultural revolution, or the overthrow of the regime.
Given that the PRC is a mature fascist state, I know where my money is.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
...I always figured that today's dominant innovation platform was "getting rich off the stuff you create".
Nerd Rock In Progress
It is unfortunate that we have phone companies working hard to limit the internet technology here in the US - Qwest for example.
I would like to say that xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxx. And thank you for listening to my words about the Chinese government's internet project.
Now we'll start seeing "Made in China" stickers on web sites.
This Post Made in China
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
is the Moon???
I meant 2 years, not 4
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Well, since the US is becoming less and less based on the study of science, it is merely a matter of time before it falls behind a lot of countries. Too bad, there are such great minds and instutions in that country - what a waste.
I'd bet the real motivator behind the idea of CNGI is to make censorship of Internet content easier. China has been threatening this for a long time. "Won't censor your internet? We'll make our own!"
If CNGI becomes an acceptable alternative to the "normal Internet", I bet that the normal 'net will be blocked entirely.
Why in the world would they add (CNGI) to the end of Chinese Next Generation Internet? This isn't some uber new technology. It's not any different from what every other country in the world is claiming they will do in the next 5 years. Oh, and if they can stretch DSL service out to my house on the lake, they can block access to articles about Tianneman Square and Falun Gong all they like. "Give me Liberty, or Give Me Bandwidth!"
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
China has historically been competing with the West, at various levels throughout history and national inferiority complex notwithstanding. During the 70's and the 80's, one of the most popular slogans was "Surpass England, Pursue America". Its "Four Modernizations" and various manifestations of five-year plans are simply more of the same.
It is interesting that China would do anything to give the impression that it is an advanced, highly evolved civilization, while everyone else notices cracks at the seams. The comment about space-born seeds having higher mineral and vitamin content would have been hilarious had they not been so astonishingly revealing about their collective peasant mentality.
So, er, who's gonna make stuff? Oh, wait, that means that all the western nations who's economies are moving ever closer to being entirely reliant on intellectual property with a real value of nil and are banking on the force of law and international treaties to bouy their economies up whilst shifting the manufacture of real goods to China will have to start making stuff themselves again.
Right now China has got us all over a barrel because they're where we get the majority of our goods, why would they fritter it all away moving to an economic model like ours?
FGD 135
So, it sounds like dispite the technical challenges, the largest problem you have over there is in dealing with government interference. Look on the bright side, at least your post shows that for all the problems you're having, censorship isn't one of them!
article #1
article #2
China is a society/government that regularly stifles "out of the paradigm" thinkers with persecution and hands control of people over to large, state-connected organizations. And they expect to promote innovation in that environment that will be as full of new goodies as Hollywood? Oh, wait...
Wait a minute, isn't this the same country whose > 1 billion minds can't even design a low-grade CPU without stealing foreign IP? Riiiiight...
China may have the resources and manpower to make it look like the next superpower, but they seem intent on screwing it up at every opportunity.
China and the USA are behind in the broadband race; each have to catch up with Sweden.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
The whole world knows that China is the real innovator...
When was the last time you bought a cool gadget that was invented in China? Let's see...
Plasma display? Invented in US (University of Illinois).
LCD? Developed in the US and UK.
Ipod? Invented in US.
Gimme something besides the compass and gunpowder...
Sig cannot be found.
"China is limited to incremental innovation both by culture and politics. Rote education and a political system with information and thought control don't create an environment for breaktrhough discoveries and inventions" ("One billion customers", James Mc Gregor)
Another great leap forward?
Innovation doesn't come from having a magic tech bullet like the Internet 2.0. Magic tech bullets come by the hundreds from having a free and open exchange of ideas, talent, motivation, and capital.
China has lost before its even out of the starting gate.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I suspect the point of this exercise isn't so much to adopt the latest technology for innovation, but for censorship. The free world's Internet/Web was built around the idea of decentralized control and individual initiative, two things the Chinese government opposes. So, rather than convincing Western tech companies to help them let the Internet in through a sieve, why not start a massive make-work project to build a new network, Chinese-style? This way China can get valuable practice in solving technology problems while trying to wall its subjects off further from foreign ideas. (See eg. Baidupedia.)
It won't work though; how can their government expect to trade with the whole world -- which means travel and the study of English, Spanish and Hindi -- without some contamination from us barbarians? That's even before considering whether a scientific mindset is compatible with blind obedience to the state.
Revive the Constitution.
has an article in the upcoming issue of the New Yorker about how China is trying to steal credit from the US for inventing the Internet.
Scientific training, related to maths, physics, chemical, and technological branches, many engineering branches, including computer science, industrial engineering, etc. represents a huge effort, both in time and space (space as people, time as people training periods). Where I live, Europe, most countries have *decades* of continuous science and engineering tradition, not only moved from the individual nor collective desire of making money, but mainly for the desire of knowledge and self growing. There is the technical training, but it is important also the social ingredient. The "hero" paradigm, as icon of the individualism, as a homerian ancient Greece myth representation, makes people think that not only collective efforts are important, in contrast to the Chinese marketting of the "massive critical mass can achieve any conquest" hype.
Chinese people, in my opinion, should be free, feel free, less perfect, less arrogant. We, humans are imperfect, then, chinese too. No propaganda will convert humans into superhumans. Keep your feet on the ground, my friends, the "we are the best" government propaganda *always* is both xenophobic and egoistical, and, of course, never true.
As rule of thumb, the scientific community does not belongs to any concrete country, the scientific community represents the whole human effort in science and technology. Please, do not divide, joining efforts we can reach new frontiers of knowledge, why? just for the joy of knowing and experimenting, for the love itself, love for science and knowledge.
I figured the race was about who could squash anonymity, privacy and freedom of speech and expression first...
I had read an argument somewhere, possibly here, that the "moral distance" between Europe and China is shrinking as China moves towards capitalism and Europe deeper into socialism. Considering that England is working with China on face/gait recognition research for the UK's expanding network of Orwell cameras, I can see that. But not because China has become especially free.
Revive the Constitution.
...of any articles that use the word "leap" to describe China's future progress. (ie Mao's Great Leap Forward)
It's nice to know that people's view of China haven't changed in 50 years. US Education system is doing it's normal bang up job.
Before you laugh too heavily about China's "space seeds," you might want to remember that most American believe:
1. The earth was created in 7 days
2. That god created people "as is"
3. Evolution is a myth
You see America can trump China in ignorance everytime.
But let's not also forget:
1. all the capital investment going into China - China leads the world in foreign investment.
2. the trade deficit - the US imports more goods from China then we export.
3. China has HUGE cash reserves, meanwhile the US is running a 6 trillion dollar deficit which will only get larger thanks to medicare and social security benefits, the war in iraq.
4. almost all electronics and manufacturing is done in china.
5. china's population - a sellers wet dream. the us' market dominance is fading as more and more chinese have disposable income.
Kudos to the morons who aren't paying attention.
Reminds me of that Family Guy episode where in an effort to stop the mutated Griffins, Mayor Adam West dips himself in toxic waste (and gets cancer.)
Given the history of Five Year Plans... let's (the US) not bother entering this "race".
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
I have to believe (perhaps naively) that this isn't going to happen, at least not on the scale the article might suggest.
All things being equal (which, of course, they're not, but...), I don't see how a country which pursues censorship and control of information on the Internet to the degree that China does can innovate and get ahead here. The free flow of ideas is a better soil for the tree of knowledge to grow.
If they have a faster network, so what???
That's like them saying that they will develop a faster motorcycle, even though the one we have now is fast enough.
Sorry China, but if there was real incentive to create a "Next Generation Internet", I bet the guys in Silicon Valley who's livelihood depends on networks will not just watch in awe.
The U.S. has a history of thinking we can't be outdone. Try the Big Three auto makers in the 70's. They were caught sleeping and allowed Honda to become huge in the U.S. And the auto industry is suffering again right now, for essentially the same reasons, no innovation. Yeah, a market system will keep things in check, but only if there is a real market. A few mergers here, a little resting on laurels there and a lot of people will be surprised. And the U.S. is not doing all that well anyway. Have you seen all the construction in China lately?
Does this mean China could beat us to Net Neutrality? Oh Noes!!!
The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents.
When Euro-DOCSIS 3.0 CM's and CMTS's arrive here in November/December, two of our biggest cable companies (with something like 3-4 million Swedish subscribers) have promised to offer 100Mbit via Cable (HFC) and have all of their ('Packetcable') network infrastructure upgraded by the end of Q1 07.
:)
Bork Bork
In the soviet union, we were always told two things:
1)the capitalist West is on the verge of collapse
2)in a few years, we will be ahead of them
Of course they didn't mean that CCCP will collapse, but ironically, it did. I guess that same goes for China: if you make a 5-year plan to become the greatest of all, you will tear yourself apart. It is my opinion that their key to success does not lie in accelerating porn industry (the 'net is their greatest tool, right). Try to prove me wrong, I'll reconsider my statements in 2011.
IMO there is no first mover advantage for IPv6. Besides more addresses, most of the other good features of IPv6 have been backported to IPv4. So the only benefit is more addresses, and you only get that benefit after IPv4 addresses have run out. So switching to IPv6 before IPv4 addresses run out just ends up costing more (since router prices fall over time, the earlier you switch the more it costs).
The article doesn't mention that there is a new NSF-funded effort in the USA called the Global Environment for Network Innovations that will enable research on protocols beyond IPv6.
You never know, they may be onto something. After all, they have people living in China that are older than our *country*.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
If I recall correctly the size of the Chines economy is roughly equal to the amount of growth the US economy has experienced since 2001. In other words, the US grew by 1 China (new international unit of econimic size) since 2001.
relatively uneducated communists take over and purge the educated.
But it really depends when you look. When China had "junks", the West didn't really have anything similar. Same for silk and porcelain. China was making developments towards steel hundreds of years Before Common Era, that wouldn't be matched in the West until medieval times.
Now, they're considered backwards, for good reason, and probably will be for many decades to come. It takes awhile to recover from such a devastating and calculated blow to civilization, especially when the cause of such devastation manages to hold onto power.
It's pronounced *intra* net. There will be no "inter" about it.
I wonder if this new internet will fit in a truck?
If China wants to be a world leader in innovation, they only need to do one thing...
Use thier 1/3 of the world population and manufacturing capabilities to blast the US
back to the stoneage.
Can't seem to get to the article at the moment.
What exactly do they want to improve on, to leapfrog the U.S.? Make it available to more people? Is there anyone in the U.S. that can't get access - at a local library if nothing else? Make it more mobile, so you have access anywhere you happen to be at the moment? I get EDGE service most places I want to be already here. Make it faster? A few megabits per second at home seems like enough to me. Not enough to stream HD content, but probably will be able to by the time I get around to buying an HDTV. For companies, they can get 10gig ethernet connections from lots of providers.
Maybe the idea is IPv6 or multicast. Nice stuff, but I don't see how it would even be noticeable to most end users.
China can duplicate or slightly improve on current network infrastructure, but it seems like their innovation will still be hampered by strict controls on information (news, web sites). I've been there and wasn't unable to reach any of my normal sites (including Slashdot), but that was a few years ago and I've heard the crackdowns are periodic anyway.
...this is really what occurred? That the seeds were the only cargo, that it wasn't a cover for some other sort of mission?
wheels within enigmas here....maybe....
Speaking of launches, they just introduced a new class of road mobile, fairly accurate ICBMs, the DF-31, that can be fitted with a large single or three MIRV type warheads.
Actual plan could have been to test a system for launching tiny few ounce hexagonal lead alloy spherules (wtf is a hexagonal spherule?). The point being you have a million of the zingers floating out there randomly and suddenly space is hostile to spy satellites (which if you add too much sheilding become visible/detectable).
When you look at the four thousand years of Chinese history, it can't help but scream one clear message, and that is the message of repeated lost opportunities due to their obsession with preserving the established order at all cost. That is why they are trying to create their own, closed "internet" and that is also why the US is so obsessed with controlling what is really a global resource as well. I think that this obsession with control will profoundly hurt bith nations, although since China's obsession is so much more total and clueless, I think that the damage done to China's future in the long run will be greater, if it is expressed as a percentage of "what might have been". However, I don't think that we in the US should deceive ourselves, in both cases, the result is tragic. Corporations (and their desire to make a quick and easy buck at the expense of the American consumer and real innovation), control US Internet policy almost as profoundly as the China's obsession with preventing any kind of real change controls theirs. Are the two really that different? I don't think that they are... they are two sides of the same coin.. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever" George Orwell --from Nineteen Eighty-Four
So this isn't just more powerful than internet like internet2. Should we call it Wiinternet?
Since when does technological innovation have it's roots in "beating the other guy". It's for advancement of society, for curiousity, for problem solving. Just because China does some research doesn't mean it's trying to win a "race". Sure they might have wanted in the past to play catch up in technological progress, but why are we so quick to assume it's a race? Why not just assume they're doing it for the betterment of society?
Where does all this xenophobia come from? The average Chinese citizen doesn't feel this way towards Americans, but for some reason, we are so paranoid about them. Perhaps the reason is that Chinese people consume a lot of American media, while here in America, we are less open towards foreign entertainment.
It's kind of hard to be creative and innovating when you're access to information is restricted to state-approved content (only).
I'm not saying that the Chinese People are not capable of such free-thinking, but currently, under an authoritarian regime, this is all a pipe-dream for the CPC.
Good luck CPC!
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
It just seems stupid to me that anyone would want to put any kind of restrictions on technology whatsoever. New technology is based on other previously developed technologies - a lot of which keeps us alive and healthy. Sure, there is a definite need for standards, but let's not dumb down the collective intelligence of the human race by limiting ourselves with restrictions.
Some technology development, stem cell research for example, may be deemed immoral; however, it shouldn't be illegal. What if no one had illegally dug up cadavers for medical research? We would still be living in the 18th century! I say that if we are burdened by technological restrictions imposed by governments (or whomever) then we should move to develop better technology that obsoletes their stupid rules. Take DRM and similar copy protection - Why go to all the trouble of making laws that restrict people from copying stuff when 20 years from now, these forms of media and restrictive technologies will most likely be as out of date as those punch cards your grandma used to program?
Let the Chinese have their own little internet with all their content restrictions. I could see a new Internet taking hold around the world, but not from a country that goes around beating dogs to death with large sticks. I just won't have any part of it!
--I'm right, even if you don't know it yet. I'm super cereal you guys.
Does anyone else think this sounds like the
hey, if China's economy is going to based off technology innovations and scientific research, guess they'll have to start respecting IP laws, they're entire economy will be based off the enforcement of them.
Here's what I want to see... A HEALTHCARE race between the U.S. and China. Who can get their entire population covered for their biological well-being the fastest?
There's a lot of hardware out there that's very fast at IPv4 but not IPv6. We've got a bunch on campus, our whole core. They are combo switches/routers (layer-3 switches if you like). Basically, when using IPv4 they don't have to touch the CPU very much. They can, in essence, route the first packet for a connection then establish a flow and switch the rest. All done in ASICs, very fast. Well these things can support IPv6, if you install a software upgrade, but only in software. There's no hardware backing it up. So the CPU has to do everything and it turns out that's not very powerful. You can quickly overwhelm the router and make things slow to a crawl.
Thus, we don't do IPv6. Eventually we'll look at upgrading, but it's a lot of money, on the order of $2 million I think for all the switches we'd need to replace, maybe more. Hard to justify spending that kind of money on something you don't really need. Now consider that we are just a university. Consider the kind of money you are talking for major backbones or ISPs and you start to see how this can get real expensive real fast.
I think we may see more of it start cropping up as newer network hardware becomes more widespread. If your hardware can do IPv4 and IPv6 equally fast, well why not use both right? However I don't expect to see a big initiative to spend money on it as it doesn't really gain you anything at this point. Despite all the crying, things like NAT have kept us from running out of IPs just yet.
...my torrent download filled my hard drive QUICK, but 45 minutes later it had plenty of room
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
I think that this obsession with control will profoundly hurt bith nations...
Does this mean the end of "the Modal Nodes"?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Are the two really that different? I don't think that they are... they are two sides of the same coin..
Right. Because American corporations are jailing human rights dissenters and harvesting organs from living Falun Gong members (well they're living when the organs are removed - after that they're dead.) I'm betting they don't get anesthesia.
Yup. Two sides of the same coin alright.
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
Perhaps this can put the "race" back in the United States languishing broadband networks. Consider this: Koreans get twice my Cable speed, for one third the price. Wtf? We are behind.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
We launched more astronauts on the last shuttle mission then China will launch this entire decade. They are also literally groveling to hitch a ride with us to the space station or the moon. We sure as hell don't need them or the Ruskies to get back. They are still 40 years behind.
The US is not likely to grow at 10% again, that is true. But we do grow at 3-5% which is the best of the developed economies. There is no substitute for freedom, innovation and a flexible labor market. People from all over the world, including China, are standing on their heads to get in here! Someday soon China will have to grow by methods other than the party plan of manufacturing supported by cheap labor and currency manipulation. Slower going is inevitable. My guess is that there will be a significant unravelling in the not to distant future. As for the Iraq outlays, consider the cost of an emboldened Saddam Hussein on the US economy over the last 5 years. $200B per year in Iraq is peanuts.
I think you mean imitator. I doubt they want to cross swords just yet. They, and the Russians, observed US warfare tactics in Gulf War II. I don't think they want some.
an ill wind that blows no good
Now just a second here, all those vile corporations of the military-industrial-corporate-congressional-prison -complex are making a fortune off of this unlawful invasion and occupation of Iraq. And China's economy is only improving so much because all of the American corporations (make that corporateers) keep sending all the jobs - in all categories - over there (along with Europe and the US, of course, I think France may be one of the few who haven't gone whole hog on that). So the multinationals have decided China is to be the next superpower as they love those totalitarian fellows......fortunately, they've started sending American hospital patients to India because their medicine is supposed to be done without sending anyone in space.....
If they are not using IPv6, how can they really call it "next generation"?
Here in the States, tech isn't government-mandated and government-controlled
*points to the subject header*
enough said..
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
look on the back of the internet and you'll see a tag that reads "Made in China"
slap me silly and call me charles bronson!
hrmpf. People without a sense of humor shouldn't have mod points.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Internet2 had a full IPv6 upgrade to a fully dual stacked network when they upgraded to a high-speed backbone in 2005. The upgraded national research network in China, CERNET2, was built out IPv6-only.
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It's about time that we upgrade the old Internet from the late 1970s designed ARPANET standards of TCP/IPv4. Just as we uprgaded from NCP to IPv4 in the late 70s to early 80s. We need a more powerful and flexible network paradigm to simplify creation of new innovative software. Sure, we have lots of patches and backfixes to IPv4 to make a decent client server model, but true secure peer-to-peer and scalable mobility are a too hard to achieve in the V4 model.
This article was written by tech guys trying to scare our China obsessed politicians into upgrading our infrastructure. It's terrible to see what it actually takes to motivate Washington. It's not a sound technical discussion by Internet engineers, but a bunch of "China is going to get you" scary stuff that gets the crowd running Washington these days to get off their butt and do something.
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
than most other people here. On June 4 1989, a friend and I were the second and third persons in my (US) city to demonstrate, by the end of that day, there were hundreds there, the next day, thousands. I am also against repression in other totalitarian countries. And I've gone on the record with that. The reason I pointed out this similarity is that I'm very afraid totalitarianism could come to the US. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Extremism only leads to more extremism. History shows us that. The surest route to communism is fascism, for example. Before every communist 'revolution', there was a fascist dictatorship. Fascism makes a lot of promises, but it never keeps them. Both kinds of totalitarianism are climax ecologies of lies. We have never learned the lessons we should have learned from WWII, it is pretty clear. Until we support international, binding standards on human rights of all kinds.. (The US, as well as China, oppose these) we will keep on repeating the same mistakes. For example, what will we do when technology makes it nobody 'has' to work anymore? How will we handle the economics of that situation? We need to start discussing this future dilemma now. Not doing so - could lead to genocide.. It could also lead to a level of hatred and global war - and the end of the human race..
China is the next world superpower? Funny, I swear I've heard this said about India too, with their math-friendly culture...
n ough-money attitude, the DMCA, militant right wing Christians aggressively pushing their ideas of morality to the masses and so on. A "lockdown" pattern has already started to occur inside the U.S. in the last 15 or so years, and if it keeps up, innovation and the spirit of introducing new ideas which is a significant driving factor to the economy will be the casualty in the end.
If nothing else, we'll have *several* super power-like nations, but it won't simply be because of China and others rising up as time goes on. The U.S. will contribute to it's own defeat, with DRM, overbroad software patents, litigiate-to-scare-your-competitors-if-you-have-e
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
LOLL. China's innovation comes from sending their scientists here, stealing the technology, sending them back home to start Chinese companies with stolen technology. Comical. When the Chinese people wake up and realize their being used in factories for no pay to make a few others rich, the country will be in trouble. It's a matter of time before union's start there and their money begin's to flow out the doors.
In fact, the real problem is that China has many more stupid people than the USA.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
She even admitted that they didn't know exactly what "cool" was, but that they had to provide the infrastructure for "cool", e.g. high speed internet access.
This is the same thing on a national scale. The Chinese government is essentially claiming the ability to will innovation leadership into existence. Truthfully, I think they could make a lot of progress towards their goal if they just let capitalism do its thing. But concepts like the "creative economy" probably don't give communist party leaders good dreams at night.
Yada, yada.
The west exports DRM media content world-wide. China exports DRM media players world-wide. Which side of that equation do you think has greater long-term significance?
Retailers can buy generic hardware from any third-world country with a modest capacity for precision manufacturing. But Chinese culture for all its richness and antiquity is mostly consumed within its own borders.
militant right wing Christians aggressively pushing their ideas of morality to the masses
It would be difficult to find a regime more prudish and puritanical than the Chinese gerontocracy.
It turns out that in ipv4 atleast, MIT has a top level domain (18) and China doesn't -- thereby theoretically putting the number of IP's at MIT > Whole of China. Now, thats one good reason for China to try and move a part of MIT to the mainland
Probably when people start spelling realise correctly, not the hemogonistic imperial American nazi way.
China is moving to IPv6! I'm so scared, they will develop applications early than anyone, oh, wait a minute, there's applications already that support IPv6.
:)
Nevermind, they were firsts!! Yes, comunism is first in everything and they're going to have IPv6!! Let's move to China!
ghostbar page.
The chinese people has always been about the long term view.
Even though currently in their history, there's a ton of short term upheaval, and decisions made with short term profit motive. Throughout east asian history, the fundamental difference between western and eastern culture is that propensity to take a long term view.
Long term view being multi-generational in east asia, whereas long term view, means 5-10 years in western culture.
So yes, innovation in china is very basic at the present time, but the thing to keep in mind is that they realise that being a manufacturing economy is not sustainable long term, and they are willing to take steps to change. The only other economies in the world which have been able to move from third world to first world status all have that east asian thinking. i.e. singapore, South korea, Japan, etc...
Maybe china won't get there in the next 10 years, but they will get there, and they will surpass the US.
We'd compete, see, but we fired everyone and refuse to hire and train new people.
So uh, we can't compete any more. Well, unless you want to buy entire seasons of mediocre third-rate television series from the 70s. Those are on sale I hear.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I'm curious who you are flaming with that. Jews, Christians, Muslims, or all three? Or are you flaming the Catholics in China? Or are you supporting the religious intolerance and oppression of the Chinese government as a good economic tool?
Somehow you managed to turn an obvious flame of Christianity into an attack on all the world's major religions, which made no sense in a country-by-country comparison. America does have a religious monopoly.
Kudos on insulting everyone simultaneously and injecting the evolution theory into a discussion about space seeds, which by the way, does make evolutionary sense to use radiation to randomly alter DNA, and see if any improved traits emerge. (A strange and extremely inefficient way to go about irradiating seeds, IMO, but hey, it's their satellite to waste.)
But you do contribute a great pointing finger for US problems. We need to drop medicare and social security right? Yes, that will make us just as competitive as China by creating a large ultra-low income class of people willing to work for pennies on the dollar. Obviously Democrats and Republicans are both wrong, and we need to stop that whole "thinking of others" thing, which is so overly cliche religious masked as good politics. [/sarcasm]
Kudos on being more "insightful" than the more than 80% of the population US population (religious, elderly, democrat, republican) and related international populations you just flamed, blamed, or want turned out on the streets.
I8-D
I see lots of gold to be farmed in that technology!
China vs U.S. in an 'Internet Race'
BWAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAA! China, internet. Wow, I needed that. If it had read "intranet" or "opressnet" I might have enjoyed the story.
China Tech? It'll be warez copies of the West's.
What were you thinking anyway?
Something I have been thinking about lately, as I see technically capable people held back by certain styles of doing business.
China, like several Asian countries, strongly drives relationships based on the idea of 'face'. I'll admit I don't really understand it, but basically it seems to me that it leads to things like:
- risk aversion (I don't want to be seen to be responsible)
- not owning up to problems when they occur
- not improving things (risk of causing problems)
- doing obviously silly things because authority told me too
- pursuing goals that are counter to real interests
This makes it very difficult to found an open, scientific, innovative, risk-taking style of economy. Instead, everyone tries to find a big organisation to hide inside and form very cautious, conservative ventures.
Also it somehow seems to prevent the development of good, usable software. There is very little of such applications coming out of China, or Korea, etc. Such software as does come out is overly stylised, sometimes almost user-hostile, and rarely improved - maybe because a good UI requires a lot of iteration and admitting mistakes and trying new risky ideas.
These aren't ideas that are set in stone, just some observations from working with some Chinese people.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
It's a lot easier to build a new infrastructure from scratch than to drag an existing one kicking and screaming in to the 21st century. Making it go fast isn't the problem, it's putting on the go-faster stripes while the existing one continues to run 24/7.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
As long as you've got lots of people with good technical educations (which China and India both have) and enough capital and business people around (which they probably have, if the bureaucrats get at least partially out of the way), you can build the rest quickly. It didn't take the US very long, once the market realized that the Web was not only cool but could make money, to have millions of people working on it, all moving to Silicon Valley hoping to become Mozillionaires. Most of them failed, but that's how business and innovation work, and that's ok. Silicon Valley developed a rather special culture where lots of people could fail while trying to do Cool Stuff, and people would hand us lots of money for a while.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Oh, shit, there's too many of us for available addresses in IPv4! Ok, let's organize to use IPv6. Seriously, "Internet race"!? Given potential Chinese growth and sheer numbers invloved, they'd be stupid not to do it.
Almost every commercial business out there wants at least two Internet connections for their web/email/etc servers, so if one connection is down, people can reach them through the other one, using the same IP address (because DNS caching is too slow to switch addresses in the middle of a transaction, plus browsers often cache DNS longer.) Smaller ISPs and hosting/colo centers have the same problems as enterprises. This turns out not to scale very well, because keeping track of multiple routes for everybody instead of just aggregates means that every router on the Internet backbones not only needs big routing tables implemented in ASICs that might not have room for them, but needs to grind N**2-sized calculations when things change so they need lots of CPU RAM and horsepower.
There are a number of different research projects like shim6 that want to solve the problem, but so far it's still fundamentally hard. The initially proposals were that everybody should only use Provider-Allocated address blocks (assigned by their ISPs), not the Provider-Independent addresses that much of the Internet uses today, and that was just not acceptable for the customer base's needs. Once somebody finds a decent fix, it's just a matter of replacing lots of big routers, redesigning ASICs to handle larger address spaces, Simple Matters of Programming, etc., and Moore's Law helps a bit with this. Until then, it's really ugly, and the IP Address Registries (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, and their self-appointed evil ICANN overlords) have been resistant to just giving out IPv6 space the way the did with IPv4 (partly to discourage a land-rush before the technology's ready, but partly because ICANN seems to view this as another potential funding source, charging money for allocating a non-scarce resource, which has a similar effect.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was just reading through a lot of these replies and a lot of them seem angry, afraid, and generally misinformed. I had some random thoughts I wanted to contribute that people might consider.
;-).
1. China has quite a bit more going for it than "cheap labor". China graduates over 800,000 people per year in engineering and sciences. How does that compare to the US (or any other nation)? Further, when people accuse Chinese businesses of paying "slave wages", they fail to take into account what these people were doing before the economic reforms that began in 1978. In fact, these "slave wages" have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty since that time. Granted, this upward movement hasn't brought most people to even close to the level that we enjoy in the West, but these things don't happen over night and I think we're a bit spoiled, frankly. And there's still a long ways to go, as hundreds of millions more still live in abject poverty. But nonetheless, it's impossible to deny (at least I think) that this is "progress" (and i use that in the sense that living conditions are better than they were, and they are continuing to improve).
2. People in the US go on and on about our superpower status, our empire. But let's be serious here. We have only truly been a superpower since the end of world war II (about the time we came up with the a-bomb). We have been the "only" superpower since 1991, which is not such a long time. People forget that we, even with democracy and inalienable rights and all of that american goodness, started out as a third world country. In fact, it wasn't until the end of the 19th century that we could really start to call ourselves a wealthy nation. And that was an ugly ugly time in history for us (the gilded age i guess), but I think it could be said that a lot of good came from all that. But seriously, America, get over yourself. You're not the smartest, most innovative country EVER, and your ruler of the world status has only been in place for about 50-60 years. How long did the Roman Empire enjoy that status?
3. On the sensitive issue of their totalitarian government, I've heard the argument that innovation is impossible without freedom of speech and information and etc. I agree, to a point. While I enjoy my own freedoms, I do not think they are necessary to productivity. Consider this: if you are an engineer, you need to be able to talk about a lot of different stuff, and think in different ways, to design a new product. But where exactly does discussion about politics contribute to that? It doesn't. People in china have freedom of speech, as long as that speech doesn't involve politics. While I disagree in principal with how the party conducts itself, I don't see political discussion/freedom as a prerequisite to doing your job or innovating in the vast majority of fields.
4. The US and Chinese economies are more intermingled than most people realize. It's relatively common knowledge that much of the decrease in prices of many consumer goods we've seen is thanks to China's ability to produce goods cheaply due mostly to comparitively much lower wages. What a lot of people don't realize is that China is financing a large part of America's debt. When dollars flow into China, they exchange them for yuan, then take those dollars and buy US treasury bonds, which the US issues to finance its enormous national debt. Therefore, America owes China a hell of a lot of money, and this gives China enormous power (or maybe it just gives america less power). Also, the huge rise in oil prices is mostly due to quickly increasing demand from developing countries (not just China and India btw) not the war in iraq or instability in the middle east. Also, most people agree that the yuan is significantly undervalued, but China has been hesitant to let it rise because this would make their exports comparitively more expensive. Sooner or later they will let it rise (so buy now!
5. China does steal quite a bit of IP from other
Yeah... but they make cheap stuff!
For the sake of everyone, I hope China can rapidly catch up to the US in terms of national standard of living. The current "problems" people think exist in the US-China relationship are really just an indication of the disparity in labor costs and standard of living. Why is it cheaper to have materials shipped into china and products shipped out and back into the US? Because of the aggregately low cost of labour and the attendant low standard of living (taken en masse.. certainly there are luxurious lifestyles being led by the massively wealthy in China..)
:), but the point being that trade with the US has other less tangible benefits that "US CEOs getting richer" or the standard of living going up on the trade partner. Part of ones standard of living is unfetted exposure to outside ideas, individual voice in government, etc. It is undeniable that Americans and Chinese know more about each other today than they did in 1955. After trade and economic cooperation comes cultural cooperation and mutual understanding.
As China modernizes and the aggregate standard of living improves, the cost of labour will go up and the prospect of outsourcing manufacturing and all "lower" sectors of the economy to China will dry up. Then I'd expect these jobs to move to the next "up and coming" economy before we eventually reach some steady-state global economy where production happens at the ideally distributed points based on availability of resources and proximity to efficient distribution.
The real concern for the US is maintaining vertical industries in-house that are relevant from a national security perspective. As long as there aren't severe national security implications for a particular market segment or peice of the economic picture, globalization and outsourcing and "races" with other countries are just a part of economic development. For every 10 or 100 Americans that are no longer doing back-breaking agrarian labour because that is now being done in developing economies, at least one of them is doing work that is distcintly _impossible_ to do in the developing nation that "lower" work is happening in. The world moves ahead, and the developing nations can recapture what it took us years to do in a fraction of the time, thereby providing the potential for equalization to happen that much faster.
The so called "trade deficit" with China doesn't bother me one iota. We're pumping money into China's economy because that is an effective way for us to be spending that money, freeing up our resources to do other things. As the world economy flattens, the quality of life of _all_ people goes up, the mobility of all people goes up, etc etc.
Finally, while the #1 thing the US exports is money, and the #2 thing might be military influence... somewhere high on the list are "democracy", "work ethic", and "self deterministic attitude". To be fair, we've been exporting so much democracy lately we seem to be running a bit low on it here at home
Exposure to the US's money, ideas, "culture", etc, will lead to an increased demand for personal freedom and upward mobility in China and in everyone that we do business with.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
...whenever some one is catching up, they are bound to be viewed with suspicion. Will they be a threat? Will they inconveninece my life? Will they thwart my desires? Is it any different from getting a 3 year old to share his candies?
I try to preserve the cold war espirit de corps.
an ill wind that blows no good
The surest route to communism is fascism
Does anyone really worry about communism, or Marxism any more? It's been so thoroughly discredited intellectually that I find such a notion difficult to believe. If there is any ideological battle in the world today, I think it is between the democratic nation state on one side, and multicultural, globalist internationalism on the other.
Before every communist 'revolution', there was a fascist dictatorship.
This isn't true if 'fascist' is used in any meaningful sense (i.e. as something other than a generic form of abuse). Fascism was itself an outgrowth of Marxism, and has almost invariably come to power in reaction to the threat of a Marxist revolution. In Germany, for example, the right supported the violent Nazi movement solely because it was seen as the only force capable of preventing the violent Communist movement overthrowing the state, as had happened in Russia. Similarly, the earlier Italian Fascism had emerged as a reaction to growing communist activity in Italy after the First World War, and the Spanish Falange was a reaction to the Second Republic in Spain.
The three major fascist regimes in Europe, i.e. those in Italy, Germany and Spain, were all reactions to communist/Marxist agitation, and each regime arguably prevented Marxists taking power in each of the respective countries. At the same time, with the exception of the former DDR (which only existed because of occupation by Soviet troops), all were followed by democratic regimes: two established by force, but quickly accepted by the populations, and the third established peacefully, by the regime itself.
Ultimately, both fascism and communism are historical relics of the 20th centrury. Modern China is an authoritarian state, but it does not in any real sense embody any particular 20th century Western ideology. The modern ideology of the Chinese Communist Party is militaristic, xenophobic and aggressive, but its only ideolological aims are (1) to preserve its own power in China, and (2) to enhance the global reputation and power of the Chinese state.
This is one of the few times I've seen "fascist" used correctly. With it being thrown around so much, I wondered when it really applied. Wikipedia to the rescue. Not sure I get all the nuances, but China seems to fit. Authoritarian, nationalist, strong government influence of private companies. Strange to think that when folks point to corporate influence of US government, that's a sign of the US not being fascist (not making a judgement, just saying the term no longer semantically correct). And islamofascist is a total semantic screwup.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
You make some interesting points. However, the Americans were fairly well educated to begin with, whereas with China, I am very uncertain about their education system and the quantity of Chinese who are able to take advantage of any such facilities. What portion of the native population in China would qualify as 'well-educated'? I have no idea.. but I believe that we can't really say one way or the other until we have that kind of information. If it were a low percentage, then it could be a substantial task before they're on the cutting edge of innovation..
Oh, and a couple of years later your planned CEV ( a copy of the Russian Soyuz) might launch.
No, a copy of the Apollo vehicle. The architecture is different than a Soyuz vehicle. Try reading the actual Wikipedia article - the dimensions are different, look at the pods - a cone versus an ogive for the reentry vehicle, different propellants, and the Soyuz never had any design point for entry to another planet. Yes, there are designs on paper but none ever built. This is a new beast built on Apollo documentation. (I know. I have friends working on it.)
As for the space seeds, your NASA [nasa.gov] is doing the same thing.
Read the f****ng article. Those seeds were **grown into plants** in space. They are checking for biological differences. The implications being whether food can be grown in space from seed to fruit (stated explicitly in the aritcle). What the chinese did is expose seeds to a space environment and bring them home **to grow on earth**. Completely different.
scientist : "We have to explore space. and test our rockets"
.. they will get space radiation that will give us a race of supermen"
bureaucrat : "What's in it for prestige? Come on, testing rockets?"
scientist : "Look um, its really important that we get this right."
b : "I can't put that in a glorious press release. You'll have to do better than that."
s : "Um....OK....we..we can put seeds on it, and
b : "sold"
this has got to be a joke. they cant even handle the internet we have now due to their government. let alone a super-net. maybe they should work on the basics first. like being able to use search engines w/o restrictions. who cares if they start a new internet? who would want access to it (considering it will be half-broke from the get-go)
I have read almost all the replies above. Sorry for my odd English,but I have some opinions to tell you,esp to those "arrogant" guys. When you are criticizing,I am wondering,have you ever went to China, and how many native Chinese friends do you have? If the answer is no,I assume that your image of China is from the news agencies. I respect one of news agencies' rules: "what has only one sound can NOT be considered as news , but just comment".But I am sorry to say that this rule can't apply to Chinese-related news, (financial news excluded).Of almost all news agencies,AP,Reuter etc(I can't consider national Xinhua as an news agencies,which just has one sound of government),esp in negative Chinese news,I can't hear "the sound of another side". I don't know why this difference occurs,maybe parts of prejudice,and another reason I prefer: DOF (lens' depth of field ) Effect,the agencies' cameras are focused on euro and US,so you can obtain sharp image there,but China is outside the DOF,so you can only get a blured, sometimes wrong picture. In some replies above,I see the "insolent","insolent" who just base on some wrong prejudice and wrong vision of China.As much as you love your free USA,I love China,although as you said,there exists poverty,lack of political right and PUBLIC free speech,unfair... But the status here is not as bad as you image.(I don't know why people always assume the extremeness for what he don't know,maybe it's simple for him to image) I will describe what's my daily life here in China, as a typical native Chinese man,to somebody who consider China as an hell full with low price labour force (you use a word "slave") which you image as "stupid", "repressive","mutinous","puritanical"... As you see me here,I can freely use internet to access global websites,such as Slashdot,CNN etc,and I DO know some sites have been blocked,but if I like,I can use a proxy to access them,if you worry about block based on content,you can use some encrpytion.And we can use chat tool such as MSN,ICQ,QQ to chat freely to each other, you can talk about ANY here,include founding an anti-government party,but I notice you that government consider this as criminous. As a common engineer,I don't believe in Carl Marx,whose philosophy I prefer are LaoDan and ZhuangChou of Chinese Taoism,and German Nietzsche.There is not as many source as Marxism,but you can get them easily from lib and internet. But all colleges have required course about Marxism,I think it is wrong.But I don't think this will have impact on students' thought.China has 600M communist party member,but I don't think them all believe in Marxism,entering into the party just showing someone's eager for political,although master Marxism formally is required.Frankly speaking,ideology is not an important part of Chinese people's life, With the longest historically successive nation,history inertia,which rooted in every people's subconsciousness, have re-entried the stage after a 30 (49-78) years.I call it "the bureaucratic",an internally stable order. Here we have the "right" to elect the "delegate",all like your councilman,but they don't touch the political things, It seems that political is the special part of China,and its form has lasted unchangeably for thousands years. (there are many officers who are not the member of CCP,traditionally they can't be the chief). For daily life,I think there is maybe no difference between US and China,(I am not sure because I have not been there ever) you can buy and sell almost everything,we too.Oh,I forget, you can buy guns,we can not. For the pirate,I am very sorry,the problem is very common here.Although plead make no sense,I just want to put it here 1,Can not find the none-pirate version.ex,I bought a pirate "Velvet Underground" disc because I can't find the none-pirate, I want to say sorry to Lou Reed,John Cale,Moe Tucker,I love your music,if it is published in China,I will buy. 2,(Main reason) It's too expensive here to us.When I was student I can not afford $10+ per disc to buy Nirvana and Led Zeppelin 's. $10 may be nothin
Lets be candid. As long as China remains Chinese they could never fully compete with an open mixed culture like the United States. We have dominated precisely because we are a melting pot. We mix in the best and the brightest of the world. We don't retrict ourselves to jews, chinese, blacks. The culture in the United States is simple eveolution. Eventually all nations will become more or less mixed over time, it's simple evolution driving us. But while some cultures remain closed, they can't hope to dominate or meet the US innovation. Our diversity is what drives our evolution so quickly. China is destined for a rapid self-destruction in the following tens of years is my guess.
"As for China being the next world superpower, call me when they get a navy. Sure, they can nuke us, but they can't even get past Chile's navy to hold the nuked territory, much less our own, and it's not like we don't have a few nukes to play with. Heck, the US has 2/3 of the quantitative aircraft carrier fleet in the world, and 4/5 of the deck space."
All of which can be taken out by a few well placed missiles with increasingly good guidance technology, or some suicide subs, or (easiest) by biological weapons when in port.
Historically, land-based superpowers like Persia and Sparta and Russia had some longevity. It was the colonial age that made navies important. Not sure if they matter now in the Troll Age, when supporting insurgents and dissenters in enemy backyards is the main weapon. But if navies do matter, then China will do exactly what Germany, Japan and the US all did in the 1890s, which is, BUILD one. All of those new navies, ship for ship, were pounding sand up the portholes of the well established navies of the UK and France and Italy and Russia in WWI and WWII. There are advantages to having a new navy. When the smoke finally all cleared in 1945 the US Navy was by far the strongest, with the UK/Commonwealth taken as a whole not far behind (Canada actually had the world's fourth largest navy as of the end of the war).
But that wasn't because of an early lead or a naval tradition necessarily. It was b because their industrial and agricultural base was larger. And China's is larger now.
As the USSR and USA proved after WWII it is hard to turn a military based economy back into a civilian one. As the USA and Germany both proved in the 1930s however it is quite easy to turn a solid civilian industrial economy into a military superpower. China will now prove the same thing in the 2010s, or whenever it gets pissed off. The later the better: why standardize on 2012 technology when you could standardize on 2018 technology? But by 2020 it's certain to be the global ruler since it will be able to rain all kinds of vile crap down on everyone else from space.
Like radioactive seeds.
I repeat, who needs navies?