C2, they have it wrong. <China prepares to head a great manufacturing empire. But empires unravel, usually from within. The forces that will determine which nations will dominate the 21st century may yet favor India's emerging reach for global power status more than China's determined grasp for that prize.
Kamal Nath, India's energetic minister of commerce and industry, states the case with economy: "China may win the sprint, but India will win the marathon." In Nath's view, this will be the Asian Century -- but not in the ways many in the United States and Europe assume or fear>
The industrial revolution made Britain top dog. Copying the industrial revolution in the 21st century based on lowest pay rates won't make China top dog. It just means they are working for low pay rates for the people who really create the wealth by imaginative creation of new things, such as CDMA, Windows XP, biotechs and cybercurrencies.
Also, empires and nations are communities of interest, traditionally based on geography when land was the primary means of production, with the eons-old territoriality built into brains during hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary battle. Now, land is not quite, but almost irrelevant.
When you inspect MSFT, QCOM and other balance sheets and cash flows, you won't find land features much at all. Nor are their businesses geographically based.
QCOM has shareholders in New Zealand [and elsewhere], product designers in India [and elsewhere], cyberphone producers in Korea [and elsewhere] and customers everywhere. The community of interest is not "India" or "China" or "USA" or "New Zealand". It's all those involved. What they have in common is cyberspace.
Cyberspace is the new empire, under construction. There are umpty hordes of us dependent on cyberspace for our livelihoods and we owe allegiance first and foremost to our livelihoods, not to some political megalomaniacs who have contrived to get themselves in charge of anachronistic nation states.
I'd sell NZ down the river before QCOM.
It won't be the Asian century, or the China or India century. It'll be the cyberspace century. Cyberspacoids will rule the world [if we still want rule the world, top dog, ideas].
It's all about community of interest.
Mqurice |
