Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

China on the Move

Over at the NY Times there is a nice article regearding China's moves to create national standards for technology creatd and used in it's country. As usual, American companies who only see China as a new market to cultivate and rape, are complaining about the measures China is taking to foster its nascent technology sector. China is doing the right thing by it's interests and would be foolish to backtrack on them any time soon. The article freely admits:

Today, the principal international standard-setting organizations have representation from many countries, including China, but American interests often carry the greatest influence.

Which is surely something the Chinese know. They also know:

"We are accustomed to the United States being the biggest market and the technology leader, so the standards have largely been American standards," said Clyde V. Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington and a former trade negotiator. "But China is going to be the biggest in the world for a lot of things. If the Chinese have the biggest market for cellphones, DVD players, computers and other things, they will have a lot of power to set technology standards."

China's effort to develop its own technical standards for the next generation of DVD's appears to be an effort to avoid hefty royalty payments to patent-holding corporations in Japan, the United States and Europe. About half of the world's DVD players are now made in China.

They are looking towards the future and don't want to simply be a dumping ground for US multinationals.

Why is this important to Pan-Africanists? Simple, If one looks at the aims of the UNIA you would see that China is doing exactly what M. Garvey had told us to do. Not to simply be consumers but producers of world needed/wanted goods. remember that China was at the Bandung conference that was famously referenced by Malcolm X. interesting to see what has happened since that meeting. Keep an eye on China folks, they are coming up next in a big way and will eventually overtake the US as a world economic and military power. They are the reason why N. Korea did not and will not suffer the same fate as Iraq. There will be no fly overs or big US bombs going in the direction of China. Remember that China downed a US plane a basically got away with it. Let's see how long those "Proud to be American" CEO's stay that way when the economic shoe is on the Chinese foot.

Links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/technology/13china.html?hp