Slashdot Mirror
China Aims To Move Up the Food Chain
krou notes reporting in the Christian Science Monitor that the current economic crisis is helping China's push into higher-end manufacturing by shaking out low-profit companies. The hope is that, instead of just assembling iPods, Chinese companies will be able to invent the next big thing instead. In this move China is following the well-worn path taken by Japan and the Asian tigers before it. "Last month, the National Development and Reform Commission announced revised plans to transform Guangdong and neighboring Hong Kong and Macau into a 'significant innovation center' by 2020. One hundred R&D labs will be set up over the next three years. By 2012, per-capita output in the region should jump 50 percent from 2007, to 80,000 yuan ($11,700). And by 2020, the study predicts, 30 percent of all industrial output should come from high-tech manufacturing."
My wife is a fashion designer, and it's quite obvious that the trends in manufacturing have been shifting for quite a number of years now. Clothes at Walmart (socks, underwear, t-shirts, etc.) used to be made in China. Now these low-value items are being made in Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, etc. At that time, the mid-to-high-end fashions were made in Korea, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. Now China has largely overtaken this mid-to-high-end market (dresses that go for up to $1,000 are frequently from China now).
Clothes today. Cars and planes in 25 years. Or is that Toyota still funny Japanese engineering that falls apart?
Also - with our recent peanut/salmonella/spinach/drugs health scares, it's not like we can point fingers at others anymore for having shabby food quality standards. I know we're still lightyears ahead of many countries, but the gap is certainly closing quite quickly.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
None of the Asian tigers has replaced the US as a center of innovation.
They don't have to. Our own intellectual property laws have strangled innovation in this country.
At least we have some. In China, forget about R&D unless you're willing to pay the police to go raid the counterfeiters for you. In Hong Kong, Shenzhen, etc. you can buy real North Face and -insert-favorite-brand-here- clothing. The manufacturers are told to produce a certain number of goods, but it's _so cheap_ to make stuff over there they still produce more of it, and sell it to street vendors, who then sell it to you for 90% less what you'd pay over here, and the street guys STILL make a profit on it.
North Face, for example, pays this fee to keep the street vendors at bay. Friend was telling me about his trip there a few months ago-- "Do you have any NorthFace" "No, no no, no NorthFace. Here look at these instead, see this nice backpack? $5." "No but we want NorthFace" "No NorthFace, I don't have it" "Surely you've got something NorthFace." The guy looks at my friend, decides he's legit and not an undercover cop, looks left and right up and down the street, and the proceeds to climb up his shelves into a compartment above his shop and begins throwing down North Face sweatshirts, fleeces, backpacks, etc.
They won't be able to move up the food chain until they get _some form_ of copyright/trademark/IP protection. There is no "code of law" there, anything they can replicate is fair game. Better make sure anything you produce can't be replicated or they'll undercut you fast.
China has changed a lot since Nixon. The current generation of young Chinese are more self-centered than previous generations. It is called the Little Emperor Syndrome. It comes as a byproduct of the one-child policy in urban areas. Since couples can now have one child, they tend to lavish their attention on one child. More often than not these children are spoiled and filled with self-entitlement as they are their parents only hope for prosperity in the future. Coupled with China's mixed economy of communism and capitalism, ambition is rewarded these days.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I think the point he is trying to make is that free markets and free speech tend to promote innovation, while government oppression tends to do the opposite.
He overstates his case--of course China could innovate, even under its current dictatorship. But all other things being equal, the advantage will remain with the West in the innovation department.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Western civilization is so successful
Western civilisation (a nebulous and misleading term, but let's run with it) has been successful over the same sort of period (say 3 centuries) as the Assyrian, Persian , Song, Ming or Roman empires, or possibly less in the case of the Romans - it is not the pinnacle of civilisation, it is not the final word in empire building, and it is not the apotheosis of innovation or even pragmatism. It will soon fade away like other empires before it.
That's taking 'Western civilisation' to mean the current hegemony of the West in world affairs, since perhaps the time of the colonies, culminating in the dominance of one of those colonies - The United States. There has been no even tenuous perception of unbroken world hegemony of western interests before then, so I assume that's what you mean. I suspect history will see the period in a more fragmented way, with a dominance of European powers giving way to that of the US, which lasted for perhaps a century. The centres of wealth have clearly been moving east in the last few decades, and that is not going to slow down.
Many empires before the US one have made the mistake of telling themselves that they are something new in the history of the world, something more civilised and refined than those around them, and will change everything due to unique trait 'x'.
PS It's interesting that empires often use 'the civilised world' to mean the world under their dominion, and barbarians to refer to those who live beyond the pale. The phrase Western civilisation is presumably born of that impulse.