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GE Venture Will Share Jet Technology With China
vbraga writes "This week, during the visit of Chinese president Hu Jintao to the United States, GE plans to sign a joint-venture agreement in commercial aviation that shows the tricky risk-and-reward calculations American corporations must increasingly make in their pursuit of lucrative markets in China. GE, in partnership with a state-owned Chinese company, will be sharing its most sophisticated airplane electronics (NYT reg. required, reg.-free alternative here), including some of the same technology used in Boeing's new state-of-the-art 787 Dreamliner."
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it... see: software piracy, high speed trains, stealth fighters, aircraft carriers. Up next: commercial aircraft!
Would China owned companies share any of their military technology with us? We are are simultaneously the strongest and most soft-headed country in the history of the world. How come talk of globalization somehow only includes us selling our shiz off?
Yep. This is how the Chinese have been doing their technology transfer without needing to pay billions in R&D themselves.
They go to a company and tell them that they'd like to build some nuclear reactors or high speed trains or something. The deal they make always goes like:
1) We'll buy the first two nuclear plants.
2) The next two you build using our people.
3) The ones thereafter you give us the plans to build, and we'll do it all ourselves, and pay you a royalty.
Now China has the plans to the AP1000, one of the most modern nuclear plants being built today, as well as a trained workforce in building it, all without having to do any of the R&D work themselves, or pay much more than just the cost of a couple plants (which they get to use anyway).
It's a very clever idea, and companies are all falling over themselves to give away their best technologies to China, since they're so eager for short-term profits, they don't realize they're shooting themselves in the foot, long term.
Shouldn't that be late-of-the-art 787 Dreamliner
Also wasn't there a court case a while ago about Boeing getting the results of some industrial espionage into Airbus? Hasn't there been speculation that some of the Boeing problems were due to blind copying without knowing why parts of the most recent Airbus were designed that way? Are the Chinese really getting anything new that they couldn't get from elsewhere anyway?
Perhaps we might start demanding that every Chinese company wanting access to American markets must locate offices here, staff them with US workers, and share their technology in turn. We did that with the Japanese...
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." -- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
China is getting a great deal on this. Not only do they get investment, but they get the tooling and most importantly first-hand knowhow to build reliable high-performance jet engines. China has had lots of trouble mastering jet engines. They are very tricky to get right, especially for them to last a long time and not be replaced every 1000 hours. Apparently just because your net.agents stole the plans from poorly-secured GE desktops doesn't mean you actually know how to use the knowledge.
The unnamed state-owned company that GE will be giving money to isn't even identified in the article. This is because state-owned company means that it is an arm of the Chinese government. Americans unfamiliar with the Chinese SOE and searching for an American equivalent merely need think of GM: owned by the government and not so much worried with making profit as keeping workers employed and achieving national political objectives. These SOEs are a major part of the Chinese economy (even though "journalists" like to tell us that China has gone all capitalist now) and doing a JV (joint venture) with them is putting on lipstick and stockings and getting into bed with the government. Whatever happens next, you know you're getting fucked. We are all aware, of course, that under Chinese law JVs are required to be owned 51% by the Chinese partner? And that there is a long list of broken companies in the last ten years that went into JVs and ended up lying by the roadside, lipstick smudged and used condoms hanging out of their asses? Look up Danone vs. Wahaha for a well-known example. GE's slogan, "imagination at work", should serve it well as it goes shopping for lingerie and a nice water-based lube for the pleasure of its new Chinese husband.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's a bit off topic, but I don't think NYT requires registration, and I was certainly able to access their article without logging in.
So they can't blame anyone but themselves when in 2-5 years from now China stops buying those parts because they have reverse engineered them and make them on their own now and dump you now that they have taken the tech they wanted...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
The US decline in global influence was because idiots have been in charge for too long. Ignore China, just worry about your own country and don't jump at shadows to turn a good faith into an armageddon cult.
Worrying about your own country isn't going to improve conditions there, when the leaders are corrupt and the voters absolutely moronic. I think better advice would be to find a good place to bail out to. Get out while the gettin's good, as they used to say.
People were saying the same things about the Japanese in the 1950,s and 1960's.
Except that Japan is a parliamentary democracy with regular and peaceful ruling party changes. Ask the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner if its just needless hand-wringing to worry about the Chinese authorities getting their hands on yet more latest tech.
They have no morals in business... because of the Communist mentality that they were brain washed when they were little.
Unlike Enron, Halliburton, ...
The idea that morals are irrelant is a very capitalist and, dare I say it, American one. Isn't is in America that you go to business school to learn that the only thing that matters is shareholder profit? That if you have a clear suspicion that your company's products are harming people's health, you ignore it until a court ruling forces you to do otherwise? And so on - this is not about Communism, mate.
What kind of a business man will put melamine in milk - this is the same type immoral thinking that they have.
The kind of business man that has gone to business school in America. Bear in mind that these businesses have arisen after China have opened up their markets; their managers have gone to mostly American universities to get their MBAs - they have learned their ways from you guys. What you are saying is that people and community should matter more than profit - very, very Communist ideas, if I am any judge.