China invented the first tuned bell, block printing, the compass, fast-food, the furnace, gunpowder, kites, lacquer coated products, measurement based on musical pitch, paper including paper money, segmented arch bridges, the seismograph and silk spinning and many other things!
Under the central government system the Chinese government built a large infrastructure for basic scientific research and developed sophisticated military-related technologies. In 1984 the government forced state-owned laboratories to obtain most of their funding by commercialising the technologies they developed.
Fast Company December 2004
If we’re really in the new global economy of the 21st century, how come everyone talks about outsourcing as though we were stuck in 19th-century imperialism? The debate casts India and China as colonial outposts of cheap, low-level labour serving the almighty American consumer. We look overseas and see only a vast pool of white-collar workers who can answer our customer-service calls or write technical manuals that no one reads anyway. This is shaking up our economy, true, but it’s not threatening our ironclad egotism: We still believe that America will remain the world’s leader in innovation while developing countries can aspire only to unglamorous jobs that require less brainpower or entrepreneurial process.
But the talk among Silicon Valley insiders is different. Their buzz is that India and China are launching high-tech companies that will innovate brilliantly — and will bring their creations first to consumers in their own lands, often bypassing our shores entirely. India and China are the world’s most promising end markets for technology, while the United States is nearly saturated. So the real issue for the coming decade isn’t whether Asia’s workers will steal our high-tech jobs; it’s whether their high-tech consumers will still buy our products.”
The progress China has made in high tech is breathtaking. Nearly as many engineers and scientists graduate from its first-rate universities as do in the U.S. A team at Beijing Genomics Institute was among the first to decode the rice genome. As many as 10 new semiconductor chip plants could one-day make China the world’s second-largest chipmaker. China has had a manned space flight. Two network switch makers, Huawei Technologies and ZTE, have started taking business away from Cisco (CSCO ) and Nortel (NT ).
Chinese high tech company to expand in California
Silicon/San Jose Business Journal February 9, 2005
“The YaSheng Group, a Chinese industrial conglomerate which makes products ranging from biotech to chemicals, says the permitting process to build a major distribution centre in Victorville in Southern California ‘s high desert is underway and it expects construction will begin in the fourth quarter.
YaSheng is determined to make the United States the focus of its efforts to become a truly international corporation in the next few years.”
