China's President Hu Talks IT Warfare

narramissic writes "In his keynote speech at the Communist Party Congress in October China's president Hu Jintao was specific in his references to one area of IT: defense. 'We must build strong armed forces through science and technology. To attain the strategic objective of building computerized armed forces and winning IT-based warfare, we will accelerate composite development of mechanization and computerization, carry out military training under IT-based conditions, modernize every aspect of logistics, intensify our efforts to train a new type of high-caliber military personnel in large numbers and change the mode of generating combat capabilities.'"

Comments

Step Followers, Not Engineers. Begin Human Wave!

[jujuchef]

Don't tase me bro, but this is because they have no encouraged cability to think for themselves. China wants to use the tried and true method of 'if you throw enough resources at something, we'll get a result'. This is counter to the Communist rule in which they exist. To a certain degree, it is very similar to the notion that it is OK for an American to not be patriotic, or even speak out against his government in modern-day without being labled negatively or face real-life harm because of exercising ones right (ie, believe in God or you can't be a good American).

There have been a number of projects that I have worked on in IT with Chinese consultants based in China. The shocking (and most often shocking) revelation I have had is the persistance for step by step instructions to almost everything. I sometimes find myself wondering what it is exactly (other than a recently over-changed government policy that now embraces MS) they actually utilize, but more importantly contribute, the usefulness of OSS because of the amount of outside thinking and experimentation that is needed to become comfortable using such systems.

Anecdote is this: China constultants assists in co-coding a massive project that involves originally western-sourced code. Upon being provided an API and an approach-based guidline to expand on the source, they insist on step by step instructions and 'scripts' for things as simple as using a copy command. Now being well-versed in J2EE projects, I would expect more than 'step 72 gives this error, everything is broke'. Eventually when you find out that step 72 broke because the pre-requisites and steps 13-20 were ommitted, you can't help but wonder how to teach the taught, 'thought' and encouraging different approaches to a solution.