Re: china question again

[Jonathan Lassen <jjspamster@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 4/21/06, ravi <gadfly@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> At around 20/4/06 6:37 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:
> > michael perelman wrote:
> >
> >> I have asked this quesiton several times before, always receiving
> >> excellent answers. So here is the NY Times saying that China will be
> >> moving up the value chain to compete with the more advanced economies.
> >> How feasable will that be?
> >
> > I was surprised to hear Elizabeth Economy, the CFR's China expert,
> > say <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#060413> that
> > they're going to have a hard time doing this - their workforce just
> > isn't skilled enough. She says that only a fraction of their
> > engineers are up to world standards.
> >
> I heard that too on your programme, but I have two thoughts: (a) she
> mentioned a six-figure per year graduation rate from engineering
> colleges and that 10% of them were up to "world standards" (whatever
> that means). Assuming the U.S has say 60%, how many graduates do we
> have? The difference may not be significant. (b) Aren't many of the
> students graduating from U.S engineering colleges (especially graduate
> level) from China, India, etc? ;-) I spent a good two years
> collaborating with engineers in China on a project to build a high
> capacity Internet router. The least I can say is that these guys were
> competent enough for the job. They also demonstrated a level of
> sophistication in terms of understanding technologies, concepts,
> processes and in particular, bringing a wide range of tools together to
> speed up a project.
>
>         --ravi
>

You're in luck, someone has looked into this.
See: http://www.soc.duke.edu/resources/public_sociology/duke_outsourcing.pdf

Also the 10% figure E. Economy mentions is from a 2005 McKenzie
report, and is an estimate of the number of Chinese engineers that are
qualified to work in an _MNC_, not qualified or skilled _in general_.
Is a command of workplace English or Japanese required to be a good
engineer? Um....

Here's what the president of the American Electronics Association said
earlier this year:

"When I was in China last year, we met with a number of our own member
companies, and I asked them ifâI had been hearing that back in the
States that, be careful about looking at the numbers about Chinese
engineers, because I had been told that a number of people feel that
Chinese engineers are, in fact, inferior to Western engineers.  And I
asked the heads ofâthe country heads of five of the most big American
multinationals, and their response to that was that that was true
maybe as recently as three years before, but that it was no longer
true, and that they were absolutely the equal of a Western engineer."

from: http://www.cfr.org/publication/9628/hightech_china.html

Cheers,

Jonathan