The Report: China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce by sticking with its successful strategies

The Report
China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce by sticking with its successful strategy of continued steady growth, coupled with continuing (the appearance of) a transparent society (where currently major decisions are made by top government and business officials behind closed doors) which manipulate and manage economies at large.

In order to be considered a great global leader China should maintain peace and respect for corporate property rights. They need to immediately focus on their serious environmental pollution problems to survive. Politically China needs to resolve the long-standing repression of the Tibetan people; it is too expensive in terms of public relations.

Caption: "The sign that says you're welcome in Shanghai" - Johnny Vulkan http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnyvulkan/1856903750/

The evidence is clear: China has McDonalds restaurants, and with extensive factories they make Dell and other computers. Bill Gates is eagerly pursuing business with China, and the Chinese government has given Microsoft the right to grant post-doctorial fellowships. Key companies invested in technology are willing to go to court to keep the most important Chinese corporate leaders. Kai-Fu Lee, once a vice-president at Microsoft is now Google's manager in China. Mr. Lee was the person at the center of twin lawsuits (suit and countersuit), a battle over which of the two companies would win him to work for them - he may be the ultimate in 'intellectual property.'

Caption ”On the Shanghai subway, rather than advertising computers for sale, Dell promotes job openings.” Danburg Murmur http://www.flickr.com/photos/danburgmurmur/247299162/

What is at issue are personably identifiable information (PII) and intellectual property rights (patents and copyrights) which are legislated and widely respected in the West.

Personal information is the feeder fish at the bottom of the information age food chain. China does not believe people have a right to privacy because of how communism is structured; this is true of members of their society until that person is wealthy and thus powerful enough to opt out of it, and even then the appearance of opting in must be kept.

Even in the West Intellectual property rights are eroding, which is as it should be, as it is not the same as owning a house, and can be damaging to others on a massive scale such as medical patents for aids, cancer, and other life saving drugs.

The Chinese style of governance comes with a 5 thousand year old administrative history of ordering a society consisting of large numbers of people. Because most people in American and the West do not speak their language nor write it, much of China remains a society closed to the English speaking countries. Due to communication barriers the West does not have the very healthy level of respect for China that it should.

The Chinese written language may give China advantages with online screens unknown in the West with their thousands of dense glyphs, pictographs, and phonetic parts. Currently it is estimated more than 1 billion people use some form of Chinese as their native language.

It can be said that he who owns the resources wins; especially true when supply chains are consistent and reliable. This applies to personally identifiable information in the information age as it relates to sales, because personal information is a building block in the information supply chain. Creating mass marketing campaigns targeting not just individuals but large groups of people is based on creating desire, an example is Steve Jobs and the Apple iPod. This is in addition to knowing what people want, not just what they need.

Meeting the needs of all people in the world is still a goal some people are working towards, while many more others try to capture wealth only for themselves and their investors. From the point of view that in the long run we’re all dead, many investors do not view themselves as breaking any moral,ethical, or other rules, just trying to get ahead, or make a profit on their investment, which they want right now. This uninformed short sighted view is killing people, and eroding the middle class of nations. Any country that has a middle class will miss it when it is gone; most countries are trying to build their middle class.

Business to Business (B2B) resource supply chains control wealth. Only the wealthy have a reason to protect privacy of information, because the poor and the very poor have much more immediate concerns. Hopefully the Chinese will learn as other countries like Malaysia did, that including diverse ethnic types is not just a ethical ideal, it is a strategy for long term success.

This lesson continues to be a painful and costly lesson to the US, which in many ways is exclusionary. Viewing the poor as beggars while subsidizing production with huge remedies is one of the inadequacies that may be overturned as international growth is managed at a global level because it can not be justified as anything other than corrupt practices. By all accounts I read, generosity in international relationships is mythical and with the digital age has only grown worse . Does it matter what you wear while you ask for money or how well educated you are? Apparently it does.

One size fits all privacy will never suit everyone because it has a biological basis and the need increases with education, and its cousin, wealth. Increasingly to have the opt out choice in terms of privacy you need wealth. That too will change subtly because as ecommerce becomes pervasive, some system or sets of systems will always knows that someone is there in some detectable way.

The patent and copyright systems can be damaging to others on a global scale by shutting down creativity, and unfairly favoring their protection even against life, due to medical patents for aids, cancer, and other life saving drugs being so expensive to produce or purchase that people are allowed to die as a result. Calls to action for multinational drug companies to reduce these costs, have changed little or nothing in the developing world. This has been featured so well in the headlines and news stories lately that it can hardly be a surprise to anyone that it is a problem – youth know because Digital Rights Management (DRM) is dead.

Ecommerce is a tool and can be used in many ways. Trading is already a cold transaction and to remove it from human context makes it even more so. In accounting they discuss "arms length transactions" - with ecommerce those arms get pretty long.

So we can expect that the human repercussions of global ecommerce, driven by the integration of B2B procurement systems, could stabilize and destabilize entire populations unless the planning is very good. That means everyone must hold the keys in some way, and be open to transparency at some level which runs counter to special interest groups . Transparency in action does exactly what it need to do, but which, for example, is not a match for the existing Chinese culture.

Real transparency in global governance with a goal to meet the basic needs of all people living sounds like a science fiction plot, but that is what makes it exciting. Transparent governance may only become possible due to radically unexpected causes, like education, religious idealism, or a shared social solution of the young through organizations such as http://www.one.org/. Oddly enough one of the religions which may benefit China is Tibetan Buddhism.

Ecommerce will not cause peace in the world, educated people working with strong idealism in transparent cultures will. Still my conclusion remains that China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce. We should invest in China.

Readings:
Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman

The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman by Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

M. David Becton Design

Doesn't everyone love M. David Becton's little square tables with all that personality? Here we have an assortment... and David regarding his work, about which he is quite passionate:

"Details in Style" is drawn from a variety of historical and cultural sources which run through our lives. I have been designing and building the furniture that occupied my thoughts and my commissions for many years.

With this new idea I have combined a clean, yet dramatic, feel with the sources of our visual history of stylistic elements. They are the result of a history degree and a life influenced by art and the theater.

The traditional lines and details of each statement are jewels in the cultural and architectural pieces of the human puzzle and evidence of the terrible effect of what six years of higher education and a sheet of imitation parchment can do to innocent scraps of wood.

Each table is designed to dramatize some voice from the past or reinterpret a cultural idea that has struck my imagination with enough force to be knocked out and take on a life of its own. You could think of these tables as a present day "Contemporary furniture beverage with a historical twist," or simply a bit of personality to inspire an otherwise harmless room.

The bases are fabricated from a solid core medium density wood fiber product designed to resist the irregular shrinkage properties of newly cut trees. Whenever possible we use purified, recycled wood fiber. For the tops we use a special veneered board that is the standard for exterior art and signs.

Each exterior seam is reinforced to eliminate finish cracking common to jointery of any kind. Our craftsmen and artists apply a resistant gesso-like surface by hand to create the look and feel of antique stone or plastic with some of the same characteristics of durability.

After the background pigment is applied for hue it is glazed with various nuanced pigment to add depth and personality. The result is a table that, although new, has the feel and personality of an older and wiser table. All in all, each piece has a sense of depth and patina all its own.

A pool in an oriental garden could only hope to feel this serene."

See David's site at: http://www.bectonltd.com
M. David Becton

Sky Flowers

Somehow, this image reminded me of what Tibet would feel like as a free place, with freedom of speech and religion, sort of floating up into the blue like a sky flower

What is less obvious is how China's invasion of Tibet has colored my life. 29 years of studying the extraordinary lamas' revered methods, seeing our world through their eyes a global view, within a completely universal framework. They love ruthlessly.

Do you know why His Holiness calls for peace? He understands cause and effect. When you can recall your last 13 lifetimes it will change your perspective too. That alone would give one a longer view.


You may ask - why don't the Tibetans still in Tibet just leave their ancient homeland, leave their farms and houses, and friends? They can not do so under fear of death. This fall far fewer Tibetans snuck across their southern borders to nations such as Nepal. There is real fear ... and as we now see it is justified.

Why don't the Tibetans come here? Why when they do come here posing as non-resident workers at factories why do they 'defect' en masse? The US does not recognize them as refugees, and therefore they can not obtain passports or visas in most cases except illegally, purchasing phoney documents in the 3rd world; it is easy but expensive.

China is trying to paint her face like an old lady to appear young, or in this case from brutal ruler to a forward thinking host of the Olympics. It appears the effort has backfired.

From the Tibetans living in Nepal, and foreign business people on my last trip there in Oct-Nov, if you travel just 30 KM outside of the Olympic Games area, you will find extreme poverty exists and is easy to see. One Tibetan refugee, a woman whose husband works as a trader, told me "In the Himalayan borders the soldiers shoot first, never ask questions."


I lucked out because the Chinese invaded Tibet. I benefited because China was power hungry. I am better off because of the highly placed Tibetans who landed here.

Among other things I was warned not to discuss religion - one lama told me that Americans have freedom of religion, but we don't believe in freedom of religion.

Long live HH The Dalai Lama, and anyone else who is a member of his "clique" hen hen he. I am completely in awe of him; I humbly and respectly bow as an American with a million billion visualized unique bodies to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

How I made this image = at work a couple of weeks I've been waiting for my software to arrive. So I made this, in stages as I learned another graphics package. Easy.