David Dodwell: Be afraid: China is on the path to global technology dominance

Excerpt:

"I have often jested that the main difference between the United States and China is not that one is capitalist and the other communist. Rather, it is that one is run by lawyers and the other by engineers.

Nowhere is this truer than in the astonishing “catch-up” occurring on the mainland in the explosion of digital technologies and their application to the daily lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese consumers.

Ask people in the US or Europe about Chinese technology and most will still cast a dismissive smile and say China remains home of the cheap and cheerful copycat stuff that fills Walmart shelves. The dangerous naivity of this view was brought home forcefully at our APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) meetings last year – the first in San Francisco and the second in Shenzhen. The first thing we noticed was that our internet worked noticeably faster in Shenzhen than around San Francisco. The second was that our Chinese colleagues were paying for everything via AliPay on their smartphones.

In awe of the smart technologies on display at PayPal, Google and Dolby sound studios, we were blown away by Huawei, where 40 per cent of its 170,000 staff are working on pure research, and the foundations are being laid for roll-out of 5G across the whole of China by 2020."

"In truth, China’s government was not doing anything unique or even novel. The Made in China 2025 initiative was based on Germany’s Industrie 4.0 blueprint for technology development. What is awesome is the speed and effectiveness with which they have built this technology self-reliance initiative from scratch. A total of 19 data labs have been established in universities across the country. STEM education (science, technology, engineering and maths) is being prioritised countrywide. A “Qianren Jihua” (Thousand Talents) scheme is trawling the world to attract brilliant scientists.

And for a US official who has for decades had first-hand experience of how US government-funded defence industry research has been carefully used to fuel the US’s technology leadership worldwide, complaints about Chinese government support for high-tech research sounds a tad hypocritical."

Rest of article in South China Morning Post: 

http://www.scmp.com/business/global-economy/article/2081771/be-afraid-china-path-global-technology-dominance

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