China Aims To Move Up the Food Chain 257
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."
MP4 Players (Score:5, Informative)
I'm quite happy with my unbranded Chinesium MP4 player that I bought from Chinavasion. [chinavasion.com]. 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 [exstatic.org] 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 [chinavasion.com] 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. [engrish.com]
They deserve to succeed (Score:5, Informative)
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.
THings have to change (Score:1, Informative)
The west has open trading for the most part. More importantly, our money is freely traded so that when the economy picks up in one place, the other gets cheaper. China prevents that. Until China carries through with their original promise, I say it is time to slowly raise an import tax. More importantly, EU is going to do this.
Re:MP4 Players (Score:4, Informative)
This is the same Chinese outfit that makes such great knockoffs of other stuff, like this copy [chinavasion.com] of a Samsung WEP-200 [samsung.com].
When the WEP-200 first came out, I ended up needing a new headset, and it looked cool to me. Imagine my surprise when I couldn't even buy one for two weeks. All the mall carts had were the copies. And they weren't that good.
China has a ways to go. Creative I wouldn't call them. Opportunistic. Which also works.
Re:innovation starts now (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit, every toy made in the 50s to, what, the 70s had lead in it. Our parents somehow survived.
"The U.S. incurs $43.4 billion annually in the costs of all pediatric environmental disease, with childhood lead poisoning alone accounting for the vast majority of it." http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/lead/pbwhere_found2.html
Re:innovation starts now (Score:1, Informative)
Of course lead poisoning [wikipedia.org] can mess you up in a lot of ways without killing you, and most of them were known long before the 1950's.
Our Parents Survived, but (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Re:Go for it (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:innovation starts now (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. But their parents were willing to tell them "No, don't do that".
Today's parents aren't into doing that so much.
Re:Culture (Score:3, Informative)
No. You should have paid more attention to nobodylocalhost's posting. How do you think Zheng He's massive fleet managed to navigate almost half the world? Answer: with compasses.
Remember the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing? The "great ships" part of that performance ended with one man holding up a compass -- and following it. That was the whole point of that part of the ceremonies!
Re:The whole point was propoganda (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Culture (Score:2, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] rather than just being spiteful.
You believe the moderator was ignorant? Do you realizes that the Cultural Revolution promoted activism, and was against the traditional thinking of listening to elders, which runs against the argument of promoting "repressed individuality." From your link to wikipedia:
People were encouraged to criticize cultural institutions and to question their parents and teachers, which had been strictly forbidden in Confucian culture. This was emphasized even more during the Anti-Lin Biao; Anti-Confucius Campaign. Slogans such as 'Parents may love me, but not as much as Chairman Mao' were common. [...] Some commentators argue that the Cultural Revolution years saw the Chinese people leave behind many uncritical habits of conformist and authoritarian thinking. This can be seen in the words of some of the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989."
Even beside the fact that the Cultural Revolution was about activism, it's hardly historic and influential, as it's viewed negatively by both the Chinese Government and the Chinese public. Again from your link:
"Today, the Cultural Revolution is seen by most people inside and outside of China, including the Communist Party of China and Chinese democracy movement supporters, as an unmitigated disaster, and as an event to be avoided in the future. There are no politically significant groups within China that defend the Cultural Revolution. [...]The PRC's official version of history regards the Cultural Revolution as a serious error by Mao Zedong, whose contribution to history was 70% good and 30% bad. "
While you may be right it's not exactly flame bait, but it sure was ignorant.
goobertoo wrote:
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.
This is just hogwash. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass [wikipedia.org]:
The earliest recorded actual use of a magnetized needle for navigational purposes is found in Zhu Yu's book Pingzhou Table Talks (èæåè; Pingzhou Ketan) of 1119 (written from 1111 to 1117): The navigator knows the geography, he watches the stars at night, watches the sun at day; when it is dark and cloudy, he watches the compass. [...]The first European mention of a magnetized needle and its use among sailors occurs in Alexander Neckam's De naturis rerum (On the Natures of Things), probably written in Paris in 1190.
Re:Good (Score:2, Informative)
How much beer can you brew? Beer requires hops, which requires arable land in the correct climate; these are finite resources and beer producers will be in competition with innumerable producers of other goods for the same resources.
If beer consumption dramatically increased with the reduction in working hours (which is a pretty safe bet in many countries) then:
Everything of value is scarce. There is a finite amount of any given natural resource available to us and everything uses natural resources to some extent. You could try to ameliorate the issue by having some central authority distribute the resources available, but the vast complexity of even a small economy means that it's a wildly inefficient process. The alternative is to allow a market to determine the values and accept that people who like stuff will work longer hours, increase demand and drive up prices.
Either that or we can just wait until Earth is Contacted [wikipedia.org].