There is no doubt that China has advanced technologically, but way too much of the credit has gone to the post 1978 reforms. In fact, China had a well developed technical capacity that was built during the Mao era that the reform government was able to build on. Pre-reform most of that technology was tied up in the defense and capital goods industries--like computers. After the reforms were introduced those gains were channeled into the consumer goods industry. Thus the lesson here is not that market reforms generated technologies from nothing.
Lenovo is a good case--it was started by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and given free the innovations of the Academy and even some of its personal. Lenovo is also a good case for showing the technological limitations. Lenovo has indeed purchased IBM's pc business, but having done so it has not localized any of the operations--it continues to rely on Taiwanese producers and US based Research and Development. Not surprisingly almost all exports of computers from China are produced by Taiwanese firms. In fact, some 90% of high-tech products exported from China are by foreign companies. And increasingly those foreign companies are taking domestic market share away from Chinese companies in high-tech markets. Here is what BusinessWeek recently had to say about Chinese technological capacities: “delve beneath the muscular statistics and hype about advances in strategic industries, and China doesn’t seem so prepared to catapult into a role of global economic leadership. Experts familiar with highly touted Chinese achievements such as commercial jets and high-speed trains say the technologies that underpin them were largely developed elsewhere.” China exported $416 billion worth of high-tech goods in 2008, “but subtract the mainland operations of Taiwanese contract manufacturers and the likes of Nokia, Samsung, and Hewlett-Packard, and China is an electronics lightweight….Most mainland companies mine existing technologies and compete on high volume and low cost in commodity goods.” On 6/21/2010 8:48 AM, Jim Devine wrote: > > China is pretty high-tech these days, isn't it? Last time I heard, > Lenovo bought out IBM's personal computing business, while there's a > lot of high-tech activity going on there. > > _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
