In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

[Ghent12]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

The Chinese will not be mere copy cats, copying is just the quickest way and most profitable way, but if there is a need to innovate, you'll be surprise how quickly they will be able to adapt themselves on that.

A lot of what matters in innovation is putting that innovation to good use. Hell, a Russian physicist basically invented stealth technology almost a half-century ago, but Russians are not credited with the overall development of stealth technology.

China has lots to look forward to, but also a population crisis of their own making and other factors. All the world has many, many problems...

[touchring]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

A lot of what matters in innovation is putting that innovation to good use. Hell, a Russian physicist basically invented stealth technology almost a half-century ago, but Russians are not credited with the overall development of stealth technology.

China has lots to look forward to, but also a population crisis of their own making and other factors. All the world has many, many problems...

Of course, China has huge problems internally, I've always been emphasizing this, the RE bubble.

[GRG55]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

There is nothing inherently creative about American people. It is wealth that allows a nation to be creative.
When you are a rich nation you can afford failure. This leads to a greater ability to take risks and innovate. Capital is heading East and innovation will follow. Without less capital in the west there will be a lot less venture capitalists which will lead to less innovation to less capital until you end up like the UK ie full of innovators but bankrupt

This has been argued before. Wealth may be a necessary condition, but it is NOT a sufficient condition. There is absolutely no way that innovation heading east can be predicted with any degree of confidence...and certainly there's no signs that it will infect China any time soon.

Although medved may focus on "reverse engineering", Russia, a rather poor nation, proved more innovative in certain sectors, particularly aerospace, than many much wealthier jurisdictions. Germany was anything but "wealthy" as it created a unique, and highly technically advanced economy out of the devastation of WWII.

At this point in time I think a valid argument can be made that the great wealth that has concentrated in certain Middle East jurisdictions is actually a deterent to innovation [or ANY change of any sort].

I would argue that one important factor that leads to technical innovation is language. Only German, English and Russian are truly amenable to transferring highly technical information in written form. Everyone not fluent in one of these languages is at a significant disadvantage.

[marvenger]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

I think touchring is implying that while China will have discrepancies in efficiency of production in various industries most of these industries will still be more efficient than the rest of the world due to cheap labour and therefore produced in CHina. Therefore in a world of no trade imbalances, china will be an island of self sufficient production and the rest of the world will have to trade among themselves according to comparative advantage. Hard toimagine but i think that is what logicalconclusion is.

[jpatter666]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

Only German, English and Russian are truly amenable to transferring highly technical information in written form.

That's a fascinating comment -- could you expand on it some please?

[medved]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

The T-34 tank and the MIG-15 were pretty innovative and both surprised the hell out of their respective opponents when first fielded but except for some fighters and helicopters, much of Soviet aeronautical development was a direct copy of western designs. (i.e. Antonov and Ilyushin transports, the Buran space shuttle)

Don’t forget Katyusha and Kalashnikov.;)

My perception is that Soviet science was pretty good but they had a much harder time engineering and building the final product to a 6 sigma standard.

Post WW 2 was when a lot of technology was flourishing, Stalin was in charge back then but despite his many other flaws, I am going to say he did approve of technological innovation. Kruschev was from a rural background. Maybe he wasn't comfortable with R&D?

The real reason is not personal preferences of the Party apparatchicks. They always pushed for more innovation, but you cannot innovate on command.

New engineering/production/service development is always risky. You cannot command from the top how to do it. I’ve seen plenty of examples when individuals or small groups of people beat big companies in their own game. I used to work for two companies that did it. The first (two guys from China) beat HP in their market niche, and the second (two guys from Sweden) did the same to Intel.

Big companies usually decide they need some kind of important development, appoint people to do it and create departments with dozens of engineers to work on it. However, doing new development for a big company means some bureaucrat is going to judge your work. This is how projects in these companies usually end up in punishment of the innocent and reward of the uninvolved.

The more centralized a system is, the less important it is to work and the more important it is to work the system. I’ve seen plenty of good engineers in Russia struggling with bureaucratic environment and trying to push their innovation through the system. The most surprising to me was, how many of them were still fighting the windmills. Their counterparts in the US just gave up and started their own companies. Most of those in Russia just gave up. Some emigrated to the US and started their own companies (e.g. I am personally familiar with this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalina_cycle ).

China definitely moves in the right direction becoming less socialist, but it will not move far enough. IMHO, it will remain a country of the big companies controlled by the big gov’t (even more so than Japan). OTOH, US moves in the opposite direction getting more socialist by the day. Down the road US will have less advantage in new development, but it will still remain.

[GRG55]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

That's a fascinating comment -- could you expand on it some please?

I've spent my whole career in petroleum and mining. Both involve massive amounts of technical writing and reports. These require enormous and detailed vocabulary. Think, for example, of the requirements in a geological study to describe in minute detail various geological strata, rock types, and rock conditions to accurately describe for another geologist, who may be reading the report years or decades later, exactly what has been drilled from deep within the earth.

With rising nationalism in the resource sector worldwide, which really accelerated in the 1970s, it has become a commonplace requirement that reports and documents have to be submitted to government authorities in the local language of whatever jurisdiction one happens to be operating in...even when the official language that the government operates in is not the "working language" in that country [which it often isn't for reasons which become obvious very quickly on the ground ].

My observation is the result of having to constantly deal with this, "both ways", over the years and around the world. A few brief examples:

• Translating an engineering technical report or a geological study into one of the Latin derived languages isn't too difficult. Operating in certain parts of Canada, reports have to be delivered in French...and it's common to just leave in the English words whenever there isn't a specific and detailed French alternative [then again, half the English language seems to have come from the French in the first place :cool:].
• Over the last few years I have been involved in a mining venture in one of the Central Asian republics [former Soviet Union]. Although the conditions under which the Russian scientists, engineers and geologists worked were primitive by our standards, the old Russian language reports are the most detailed, precise and clear compared to the more recent stuff we have had to deal with in a myriad of other languages including Korean and Chinese.
• Translating technical or legal documents to or from Arabic is almost hopeless. In some Middle East countries, such as Egypt, Arabic documents are mandatory...and many of the staff, especially lawyers, in the Ministries and State owned companies [with which one must deal] are not fluent in any language other than Arabic. We try to get around this by having a two language contract document with clauses side-by-side in two columns, but huge amounts of time and money get burned up trying to deal with this because Arabic simply does not have the breadth of vocabulary. I once asked a good Arab friend of mine why his language was so hopeless for the modern world. His cheeky answer was that Arabic was a language devoted to writing poetry, since that is what his nomadic bedouin ancestors used to do out in the desert at night as they stared at the stars for inspiration.
• My experience with German also comes from working in Central Asia. Stalin deported east Europe Germans to the sparsely populated steppes of Central Asia after WWII [my chief geologist has a German surname and is still completely fluent in the language, even though he has never been anywhere near Germany].

The above isn't intended to be an exhaustive description of how I came about my previous conclusion - and it could be that some find those observations about the importance of language offensive. But if the English translations of user manuals for Chinese made electrical consumer goods is any indication, there's a serious challenge moving between the two languages...;)

[bill]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

But if the English translations of user manuals for Chinese made electrical consumer goods is any indication, there's a serious challenge moving between the two languages...;)

Agree, and the Chinese are extremely concerned about this. Chinese set up Hanban expanding the Confucius Institute program.

http://english.hanban.edu.cn/kzxy.php

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepu...guage0307.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/ed...21chinese.html

[touchring]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

The above isn't intended to be an exhaustive description of how I came about my previous conclusion - and it could be that some find those observations about the importance of language offensive. But if the English translations of user manuals for Chinese made electrical consumer goods is any indication, there's a serious challenge moving between the two languages...;)

They are improving fast. Actually I would even suspect that by now, there are more proficient English readers and writers in China than in India. But most can't speak due to the lack of practice.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

I've spent my whole career in petroleum and mining

I spent my most recent career in open source Internet and operating system software. There the conversation and development happens around the clock across borders, global interoperability is essential, and the essential product is a mix of code and natural language. There is only one language for such work: English. It comes in various variants and levels of skill; not every kernel hacker has read the works of Shakespeare. But if you can't at least stumble along in English, phrase book in hand, then you must for the time being focus your talents, however great, elsewhere.

I hear it is similar with air traffic controllers at international airports.

I do not know that some or many other languages are inherently less able; I don't have the experience such as you do with Arabic speakers on this matter. But I suspect that there are metrics of language complexity which would at least partially confirm your observations.

[llanlad2]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

I disagree. There are several examples of rich nations not being creative. Rome never achieved the creative greatness of little Greece. Imperial Russia was fabulously wealthy (I've seen the palaces) but the Renaissance occurred in Italy. Japan is still one of the wealthiest nations in the world, why hasn't it seized the innovation lead?

Granted, wealth does not equal innovation but it is a vital ingredient. I think the Chinese leaders are also aware that they need to encourage innovation and will do everything they can to get it. And if they can't produce it themselves they will pay others to do it for them.

I would argue that one important factor that leads to technical innovation is language. Only German, English and Russian are truly amenable to transferring highly technical information in written form. Everyone not fluent in one of these languages is at a significant disadvantage.

I find that difficult to believe. I am sure the Chinese may have felt the same way about European languages had they travelled here between 400AD and 1200AD. "Those European languages are so simple and backward they haven't even got a word for gunpowder. And their money is this heavy metal stuff. I don't think they know what a printing press is yet!" Back in the day all of these inventions must have been highly technical and complex for the time and the Chinese language was able to adapt/grow/add new words as and when needed. Chinese is very amenable to loan words, so if the word doesn't exist in their own language they will just use the English one with a Mandarin twist. They just need to understand the vocabulary first.

English became the Lingua Franca (the French probably thought there was something superior about French when that phrase was coined) because of the economic/military dominance of firstly the UK and then the US. Already in Asian countries some students are choosing to learn Mandarin instead of English. This will accelerate if China does manage to provide opportunity which is admittedly far from a sure thing.

[BiscayneSunrise]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

English is also the official language of aviation. Aviation jargon used by controllers and pilots is not very complex, though. As a matter of fact , it is kept very simple and everyone knows to keep as close to standard phraseology as possible.

Depending on the region, the English of controllers and local pilots can be quite good. Over the past 30 years the improvement the fluency of controllers around the world has gotten pretty good, given, that it is the world lingua franca now.

Best of all are areas that have had a large British or American presence, i.e. Panama, Iran, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong. Japanese controllers are heavily accented but know what's going on and do a really good job. Arab controllers from around the Gulf are pretty good, too. Like in any sort or travel, when going to airports off the beaten path or late at night, things can get sketchy. At 2 AM, controllers from Sebastapol and Moldova are incomprehensible!

Chinese controllers are pretty good haven been screened for their English. Chinese airline pilots have fairly weak English skills given they were selected by their Air Force mainly for flying and warrior skills. Once they find themselves in a civilian cockpit, the fun begins!

Ironically, the Scottish and English controllers can be the most difficult to understand. ;)

[Ghent12]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

• Translating technical or legal documents to or from Arabic is almost hopeless. In some Middle East countries, such as Egypt, Arabic documents are mandatory...and many of the staff, especially lawyers, in the Ministries and State owned companies [with which one must deal] are not fluent in any language other than Arabic. We try to get around this by having a two language contract document with clauses side-by-side in two columns, but huge amounts of time and money get burned up trying to deal with this because Arabic simply does not have the breadth of vocabulary. I once asked a good Arab friend of mine why his language was so hopeless for the modern world. His cheeky answer was that Arabic was a language devoted to writing poetry, since that is what his nomadic bedouin ancestors used to do out in the desert at night as they stared at the stars for inspiration.

I've heard this before of the Arabic language, but also of Farsi. Good to have confirmation.

[aaron]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

Chinese takes twice the time to learn to read and write. All things being equal, that is an extra couple of years "wasted". If our kids worked as hard as theirs, we would kick their butts.

[jpatter666]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

I spent my most recent career in open source Internet and operating system software. There the conversation and development happens around the clock across borders, global interoperability is essential, and the essential product is a mix of code and natural language. There is only one language for such work: English. It comes in various variants and levels of skill; not every kernel hacker has read the works of Shakespeare. But if you can't at least stumble along in English, phrase book in hand, then you must for the time being focus your talents, however great, elsewhere.

Yep. Was discussing this very topic with a hacker friend this evening. He mentioned a time a few years ago when he was in Germany. Looking at the source code for a project, he noticed all the comments were in English and asked why.

The programmer gave him a "are you seriously asking this question" look and said -- "because we want to sell it outside of Germany"