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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."
this makes me happy that I'm learning mandarin. å好ä
I look forward to the new and inventive ways to hide toxins in consumer products.
I'm quite happy with my unbranded Chinesium MP4 player that I bought from Chinavasion.. All I wanted was something that would let me watch TV shows or movies at the gym. I looked at the iPod Touch and Nokia N800 products but they were all over kill (and over priced). This fits the bill perfectly. The software is XP only and just a gui wrapper to mencoder, but the ini let me write a nice shell script to do it on Linux/OS X.
There are quite a few products on that website that seem pretty cool. I'm thinking of getting the toothbrush cam to see if it will make a cheap bore scope for engines, etc. This hard drive enclosure seems pretty cool (Although I'm sticking with my XBMC).
The BEST part about all of these products is that they can't afford a proprietary connector nor can they afford to lose market share to not being able to connect to everything. Everything is Mini-USB or USB.
The biggest problem they have right now is UI and translations. The "MP5 Player Manuals" is quite entertaining to read and full of Engrish.
Wah, i am gonna miss the cheap copies of electronics. Damn it. :-D
Well, I don't know about the situation regarding health care and education. But Hong Kong certainly *looks* very advanced already.
None of the Asian tigers has replaced the US as a center of innovation. That is a game the US will lose if the government keeps favoring establish Fortune 500 companies over small nimble truly innovative start ups.
Think Deeply.
Japan is also a culture on conformity. Look at where they are now.
In fact, the same could be said about us and our "religious culture." Take off your myopic generalizations on different cultures.
They have been working at this for decades. My brother travels often to China where he oversees production designed here. He admires their industry (human and machine), relative honesty (not that different from Western companies), and ambition. A company with 100,000 employees has 100,000 people all wanting to own it. The government not only supports business, they have schemes to induce overseas Chinese to return to lucrative positions. And they are not too sympathetic to freeloaders.
In short, he likes them, and considers them a major looming threat. Every design he brings in he knows will be analyzed to enable them to better it. Hey, ho, that's evolution. Competitions wonderful if you can beat it often enough to live. If not, introduce protectionism and live off your capital for a while.
They are not tigers of course. Those are a protected species. Not T. rex cos that's just a bunch of bones. I cannot think of a suitable analogy. An unassuming animal that out-competes us while we are watch video games.
This is nonsense. Answer me this, How did China invent paper, compass, press printing, and gunpowder then? How did Zhen He travel the world in leviathan sized ships and even left traces in California then? Just because China repressed individuality doesn't equate to repressing innovation. In fact there are many many innovations in China most of us probably never even heard of. The only problem is China hasn't been applying its innovative power toward the right path. People innovate to copy the look and feel of others product, they also innovate to break any sort of protection and drm schemes that we have in our products. This is really a legal policy issue. People are not properly motivated to innovate and create new products, better products. Many local Chinese business operate on the idea where they just have to copy what is popular. This in term cuts down their operating cost because the basis of the idea already exist and the marketing has already been done. The government should give more incentive for entirely novel innovations, and that is how China can reinvent itself and become a real top-tier player in the world.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Yes, much like those repressed, authoritarian Germans, I don't think we'll ever have to worry about innovation coming from such societies.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I'm not sure that western culture can argue from a position of strength at the moment, seeing as most of our advertising revenue is spent on persuading people to take up lifestyle brands. I'm not sure that we have many individuals left under the age of 40. I'm throwing this out as a challenge of course, but I'm seeing huge pressure for rather drone like conformity being expressed in politics as well as the commercial sphere.
It doesn't take very many creative types to grab hold of the rudder and steer the ship - just look at the impact of the iPhone - or the Walkman cassette player for that matter from another society formerly regarded as too conformist to change the world. The creatives in China have had access to a western lifestyle for more than a decade now and I predict that its not going to be long before interesting new things start flooding out in a very visible way.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
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.
How does a society that historically repressed individuality (aka "thinking for yourself") overcome these traditions and start to innovate (aka "thinking of NEW things")? ...
How many generations of Chinese have been born into that way of thinking? Isn't it possible that those 'creative-thinkers' might have been "bred-out" of the population?
Oh, you were referring to China. I thought that you were referring to the US and for what passes for our entire public education system. It seems that we've been leaning heavily on the primary schooling of other countries for some of our best new immigrates. If we were so great, why does it seem like every other educational system in the world is better than ours except for maybe our R&D university system. (Heck, that's where we make the biggest use of foreign educated folks!)
Saying that we are free thinking is silly. The US has historically repressed individuality. The Pilgrims and Quakers didn't come over here because they wanted their children to be free thinking individuals. Our system has encouraged farm workers and factory workers, but discouraged anyone of being an inventor. Those are the weird folks.
China if anything has a history of valuing the types of folks that we routinely dislike. O.k. they have a stricter general system, but they do ID certain types and pool them all together sooner than we do. You can be creative as much as you want within your field, but every where else you need to conform. That's the same general rules as the US. If you don't conform to the surrounding rules, the general population will arrange the rules, laws, mores, and police to where you'll be arrested and jailed sooner or later.
Lead Seldom Kills, but it often would cause anemia, behavioral problems, Diminished IQ, lethargy. Sure they survived, but how many of them would have had better lives?
The ones who are suggesting that the Chinese are incapable of making high end or innovative products.
Are you aware of how enormously successful Chinese immigrants are in places like Silicon Valley, where there's actually money and motivation for R&D? Did you know that both ATI and Nvidia were founded by Chinese immigrants? Did you know that there are many high end computer parts companies in Taiwan (who are ethnically and culturally Chinese)? Are you aware that the average IQ of a Chinese person is 105, which is exactly the same as the average IQ of a Japanese?
I guess what I'm trying to say here is, those of you who underestimate the Chinese will be proven wrong in the coming years, just like how nobody took Japan seriously when they first entered the electronics and automobile industries.
Then those manufacturing jobs can come back to United States.
China has for decades been losing manufacturing jobs to robots faster than the US hase been losing manufacturing jobs to China. Any job that can be easily automated, from manufacturing to paper-pushing, will be. Those jobs are toast. There's no point in whining when they move to someone who's willing to work cheaper than a robot (or shell script) - those simply aren't jobs for humans in the long run.
This is *not* a zero sum game, nor a race to the bottom. If every human in the world were working efficiently (ie.e, not do work robots can do) we would be producing such an amazing amount of goods and services that everyone could have a comfortable lifestyle, despite uneven distribution of wealth. Forcing goods that could be made by robots to be made by humans, or otherwise lowering the efficiency of the total human economic output, only means less stuff to go around.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
One of the issues in shifting gears to these new high tech capital intensive industries is the shift away from low-capital, labor intensive industries.
In developed countries this is counterbalanced by the suddenly unemployed workers going back to school or entering a new job that should overall pay better and produce more overall as the unemployed fall into appropriate jobs(effient allocation). Capital intensive jobs need education on how to utilize that capital(machinery, computers, development software, etc.).
However, in a country as huge and diverse as China you have sections of highly developed and wealthy people, and sections of abject poverty.
A good example is the Three Gorges Dam which displaced millions of people when they flooded the river valley and towns and villages that lived off it(Remember how Bush got slammed for how he handled Hurricane Katrina? This flood was actually man-made and much bigger!). The rationale of this huge dam was that the electricity would help catapult modern china into competition with the other first-world countries, i.e a propaganda move. Essentially, poor Chinese were pushed aside to help develop the modern areas.
In the USA, if you get kicked out of your job, you try to get another one. You've probably got a highschool diploma or GED. You can read a training manual, or maybe even take out a loan to go back to school and accumulate some knowledge capital so that you can sell yourself and your education to get a better job than the one you lost. If you're a poor fisherman who can barely read, when you lose the river your family has lived off of for generations...you're pretty screwed. You don't have the education infrastructure to enable you to fall into another line of work as easily.
It may be prudent for China to invest more heavily in its infrastructure before trying to chase after other countries which are much more thoroughly developed.
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.
These are all wonderful inventions - and China should be proud of them. But remember that Zheng He's fleet and charts were burned after he died, and China turned its back on the world. What great inventions and innovations have come from China since the decline of the Ming?
The past 500 years have been an era of stagnation for China. Perhaps things are not as visibly bad as they were 100 years ago, but I see little proof that it is entering a new age of innovation.
Yes. HFCS is only "dangerous" if you over eat it, just like sugar - or for that matter organic raw vegetables. Aspartame, as far as anyone can tell, only hurts certain people who have a reaction to it.
Melamine in baby formula or pet food, on the other hand, will cause kidney failure in a very short period of time. Antifreeze in toothpaste or cough medicine will do the same. Lead in paint on childrens' toys will cause developmental problems.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Why is this modded, "Flamebait"? His the parent's post is correct. The gp post is iffy at best.
I'm going to assume the moderator was ignorant of the Cultural Revolution rather than just being spiteful.
Also, saying the Chinese invented the compass is about as accurate as saying the Greeks invented the steam engine. While technically true, in both cases they were clueless as to what they had discovered or how to leverage it. In the Greek's case, the invention went completely under developed. In the Chinese case, it was actually foreigners who adopted it for navigation and taught the Chinese to use it for something other than Chi lines and harmony.
If only one person per family is employed, but that wage pays for everything a family needs to live and a number of luxuries, then the system works. Or, better, if you can earn what you need working 10 hours a week, there will be *far* more jobs.
The point of an economic system isn't to provide eveyone with a job, or with money, but to produce and distribute the goods and services that people want and need. Forcing people to work at some job to earn their keep works better than any alternative we've tried thus far, for social and psychological more than economic reasons, but that doesn't mean everyone working 60+ hours a week. Short work weeks are a *good* thing. One parent raising the kids full time is a *good* thing.
Never lose sight of the ultimate goal: eliminate scarcity. Pointless make-work jobs are a bug, not a feature.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Haven't you all noticed? It's only the largest event in modern history.
Talk about bizarrely misplaced complacency. Particularly since the US is a trillion in debt to China and has shipped most of the production capacity there as well.
Deleted
These are all wonderful inventions - and China should be proud of them. But remember that Zheng He's fleet and charts were burned after he died, and China turned its back on the world. What great inventions and innovations have come from China since the decline of the Ming?
Exactly. Western civilization is so successful, effectively dominating all others, not because it was the "smartest", but because it was the most pragmatic. Inventing powder is a great invention, but using that knowledge to engineer groundbreaking powder-using weapons that change the whole balance of the battlefield is what gives real world results. Same goes for compass, steam engine, and there are plenty other examples.
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.