Pantheon Books

On my early visits to China in the mid-1980s, I assumed that as a Western journalist I would be noticed, followed, surveilled — and I was. Most of the time today, however, foreigners are noticed only to the extent that they provide an opportunity for, or create an obstacle to, a business deal some Chinese dreamer has in his or her sights.

These are the successes. Some of the limits and failures are well publicized: among others, the environmental despoliation that has made cancer the leading cause of death in China; the demographic shift caused by the one-child policy that threatens to make China the first society to grow old before it grows rich; and the problems of transparency and accountability in the Chinese governing system, illustrated most recently by the Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng cases.

Those, at least, are the problems that get the headlines. But there’s a bigger one, which the Chinese government and public are only now starting to recognize: whether the success of China’s current model is leading toward a “low-wage trap,” in which its outsourcing factories get bigger but don’t necessarily move the country toward the higher tiers of the world economic structure.

Put differently, will Chinese companies ever go from assembling iPads to fostering future Apples of their own — or, similarly, from selling knockoff copies of Western movies, music, search engines and online apps to establishing China’s own pop-culture industries with worldwide profits and soft-power appeal?

via The New York Times, “Can China Escape the Low-Wage Trap?” by James Fallows, author of China Airborne.

China Airborne by James Fallows is out today! About the book:

More than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. Chinese airlines expect to triple their fleet size over the next decade and will account for the fastest-growing market for Boeing and Airbus. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. In 2011, China announced its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. Its goal is to produce the Boeings and Airbuses of the future. Toward that end, it acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aviation, maker of the world’s most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus and other small aircraft.
 
In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of this project and explains why it is a crucial test case for China’s hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi’an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China’s pursuit of aerospace supremacy. He concludes by examining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of the world—and the right ways to understand it.

Read an excerpt here.

(Photo of Xi’an Xianyang International Airport via Wiki Commons.)

Science geeks (or those who appreciate a good, funny tale of genius), take five minutes out of your day to read this fantastic comic from The Oatmeal please.

[T]hough we don’t realize it, we are making many decisions each second. Should I spit out my mouthful of food because I detect a strange odor? How shall I adjust my muscles so that I remain standing, and don’t tip over? What is the meaning of the words that other person is uttering? And what kind of person is she, anyway? These decisions seem effortless—but that is only because the effort they demand is expended in parts of the brain that function outside awareness. Take speech. When you read the sentence “The cooking teacher said the children made good snacks,” most people automatically understand a certain meaning for the word “made.” But if you read, “The cannibal said the children made good snacks,” you automatically interpret the word “made” in a more alarming sense. The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well-appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated by an apocryphal story of the early computer that was given the task of translating the homily “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” to Russian and then back to English. According to legend, it came out: “The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.” Luckily, our unconscious does a far better job, and handles language, sense perception, and a myriad of other tasks, leaving our deliberative conscious mind time to focus on more important things like complaining to the person who programmed the translation software.

(from Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow)

Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson is out today!

From Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson, coming 3/6.

Learn more about Zworykin, Alan Turing, and the origins of the digital universe in Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson, coming in March from Pantheon.