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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."
I look forward to the new and inventive ways to hide toxins in consumer products.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.