China at great stress to pretend playing second fiddle

There wasn’t the usual press frenzy about China having developed the second fastest super-computer in the world. It was a very subdued reporting, almost rid of the usual fanfare in achievement reports. Well, nobody bothers about second place right? But it was nevertheless significant, coming from a developing country with over a billion people to feed. There is always the fear that one gets beaten and beaten squarely. That perhaps the press boys were worried about as well. Especially the boys in MIT and those that live on glamor reporting, it is going to be a case of one always looking at who is lurking behind their shadow! A second place is certainly intimidating enough. With government support, there is no telling when they will be number one, or perhaps, they are already number one!

It was off course not surprising. After all, China is realistically the number two largest economy in the world. It has always been the western dogma that a country without a free flow of ideas will never win the day, in terms of technology. And China is far from a free country. Why then should people slot it out to put such a state to great heights? Understandably, China is a far cry from what it used to be. For one thing, they have been able to put their scarce resources in the right place that matters. They are no political squabbling s, or at least none observable. Like the Olympics, there are able to train their people from the ground up. And they don’t have a free press to do the reporting. Certainly, Sun Zhu’s warfare techniques would have put into practice.

Certainly, nobody knows about the fact that China has a silicon valley! Do you? But they have one at Zhongguancun. It is true that it is difficult to even pronounce it, and even more difficult to remember it. China, unknown to the rest of the world has liberated its educational system. It has almost 200,000 foreign students studying there, and not only that, the students have very good rapport with industries. They can talk and discuss about industrial focused problems and they go about putting their minds to work. America has also used the model of foreign students to add verve to its curriculum. The ideas from foreign students, largely from China, have contributed to great solutions. China has now caught up and it would not be a fiction of imagination that the day will come soon when we talk about a Harvard, or a MIT of China.