M’sians and M’sia should consider emulating what is applicable that makes China so successful in technology and economy

8 things you need to know about China’s economy
23 Jun 2016
Jonathan Eckart
Project Specialist, Inclusive Business Strategies, Global Leadership Fellow, World Economic Forum Geneva
The Chinese economy receives a lot of interest in the media but it can be difficult to keep track of the basic facts. Here is an overview of China’s economy in the context of its global economic rise. China was the world’s largest economy in 1820 – and is the second largest economy today. When President Monroe looked beyond the United States in the 1820s, he saw a vastly different world than the one we see today: the Greeks had just begun to revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Brazil declared independence from Portugal and the world’s first modern railway opened in England, where the first industrial revolution was already underway. Meanwhile, China, where the Qing dynasty approached its third century of imperial rule, held the largest share of global GDP. Two-hundred years later, global economic leaders and tech experts gather in China against the backdrop of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. China is now the world’s second largest economy (and the largest if measured in PPP terms), having fallen behind from the late 19th Century onward as several industrial revolutions compounded in the Western world. But China began an unprecedented economic catch-up in 1978 … for more, go to https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/8-facts-about-chinas-economy/ 

M’sians and M’sia should consider emulating what is applicable that makes China so successful in technology and economy

KUALA LUMPUR (May 2018): The absolutely peaceful change of federal government in Malaysia for the first time in six decades has catapulted the country to world attention.

The majority of Malaysians who voted and toppled the 60-year-old Umno-led (Alliance) corrupted Barisan Nasional regime in the May 9 14th General Election (GE14) have suddenly being hailed by the rest of the world as role-model citizens of democracy.

Suddenly, Malaysia is today in the global news for all the right reasons.

The new Pakatan Harapan (PH) federal government led by the 92-year-old Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who returned to active politics after a 15-year retirement, is also giving Malaysians and Malaysia a new and youthful change in federal administration - focusing on eradicating corruption, among other key policy changes.

Dr Mahathir’s focus on cleaning up the country of the corrupt is certainly a step in the right direction - as was seen in China.

It is, therefore, plausible for Malaysians and Malaysia to study China’s successful rise in world technology and economy, and perhaps emulate the applicable successful strategies for implementation.

Here’s a narration of What factors caused China's success? (Author Unknown):

"Author unknown:

What factors caused China's success?

A set of factors embedded in China’s history and culture work together to influence the behavior of the people and government in China in their pursuit of personal well-being or the national goal of economic growth. More specifically, there are five highlighted factors:

⑴The huge size of China’s population and domestic market

⑵China is not only big but also homogenous, with the Han people accounting for 91.51 percent of its total population. Its Ethnic Fractionalization Index (EFI) is among the lowest in the world, at 0.154, or the 138th among all of the 159 surveyed nations. More importantly, China’s economic growth has been taking place mostly in the provinces populated by the Han people, where the population is even more homogeneous. The Han constitutes more than 99 percent of the populations in the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong, Anhui and Jiangxi in East China, 98 percent in the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian in Southeast China. As a result, social tension, unrest, and hate crimes caused by ethnic, religious and cultural differences, a common place in many other developing or developed countries, are largely absent in the Han provinces. The shared language and culture allow any individuals of the Han people to work or receive education anywhere within the Han provinces. In the absence of linguistic, religious or social barriers, there are also better chances for individuals in China to move up the social ladder.

⑶China is also a highly secularized society. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, 61 percent of people surveyed in China claim themselves to be atheists, far above all other societies (followed by 34 percent in Hong Kong, 31 percent in Japan, and 30 percent in Czech). Preoccupied with material gain, personal fame, or career success, they are at least interested in things and ideas pertaining to after-life or the supernatural world. This attitude of materialism and pragmatism explains in large part why economic reforms in China, centering on marketization and privatization, have been so successful since the 1980s. No wonder that 74 percent of the Chinese polled by GlobeScan in 2005 agreed that “the free market economy is the best system on which to base the future of the world,” a result higher than that in any other countries (71 percent in the United States, 43 percent in Russia and 36 percent in France). Indeed, market economy works the best when it marries the most secularized society on earth. This is especially true when we take into account the factor of cultural values. Central to the economic values in Chinese society are “diligence” (qinlao) and frugality (jiejian). China has been known for its high saving rates in the past four decades, consistently above 35 percent, peaking at 50 percent in 2010, and remaining around 46 percent in the past few years. High savings, together with the ample supply of labor force, have sustained China’s massive investment in manufacturing and infrastructural projects in the past decades.

⑷Another advantage of China lies in its human capital. The largest pool of engineers in the world, the high quality of school education that the millions of Chinese high school and college graduates have received, the diligence and capabilities they have displayed on the workplace, and most importantly, the availability of such a highly qualified labor force on a scale unparalleled elsewhere in the world, have made China the most attractive destination for investors. No wonder that Tim Crook, the CEO of Apple Inc., repeatedly told the media that the reason why Apple moved its manufacturing to China was because of the high quality of the Chinese labor force rather than its low cost. As he aptly put it: “The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S. you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields.”

⑸China further benefits from the advantage of an active state in making long-term development strategies and its impressive abilities to implement them. Examples of such strategies include China’s 1982 strategy to quadruple its 1980 GDP by 2000, the 2002 strategy to quadruple its 2020 GDP again by 2020, and most recently the “Made in China 2025” program. In the past, China has reached its goals years earlier than the preset deadlines (its GDP grew four times its 1980 level in 1995, and four times its 2000 level in 2015). The secret behind China’s successes in achieving its goals in the past is the stability of its government and the predominance of technocrats in it, who formulated and implemented long-term development plans without being controlled by any specific interest groups or interrupted by the change of government. This is in sharp contrast with the powerful influences of interest groups in the making of short-term domestic or foreign policies, and the frequent change of governments or administrations that makes the formulation, not to mention the implementation, of long-term national strategies nearly impossible, as widely seen in many other developing and even developed countries.

To recapitulate, China’s huge population and the immensity of its domestic market allow for the growth of all sectors of manufacturing and the emergence of thousands of industrial clusters throughout the country; these, coupled with the abundant supply of a well-educated, hard-working labor force and the unusual stability of a homogeneous society, explain China’s unparalleled attractiveness to investors home and abroad. The central government’s implementation of long-term growth plans, and its massive investment in infrastructural networks further contribute to China’s global competitiveness. It is, in a word, the functioning of all these factors or the meta-power they generate that propels the phenomenal growth of the Chinese economy."

Reporter's notebook: China's shedding its copycat image with innovation after innovation
· China has become an emerging name in technology due to the success of internet companies like Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu
· Mainland firms dominate areas of tech including payments, drone manufacturing and artificial intelligence
· In order to make money in China's tech and innovation space, investors need to bet on the right company
Saheli Roy Choudhury
Published 8:34 PM ET Tue, 18 July 2017聽聽Updated 9:07 PM ET Tue, 18 July 2017CNBC.com
This article is part of a "Reporter's Notebook" series, wherein CNBC journalists submit tales and observations from the field. China's shift from a country that copies ideas from the West to a tech and innovation powerhouse is no longer an aspiration — it's a fact. That was the repeated conclusion last week at one of Asia's largest tech conferences. "China is changing from the so-called copycat nation to innovation nation," Jing Ulrich, managing director and vice chairman of APAC at JPMorgan Chase, told audiences at the RISE conference in Hong Konglast week. China's rise in technology has been spurred by the emergence of large companies such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu that paved the way for other local firms to follow … for more, go to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/china-emerging-as-a-tech-and-innovation-powerhouse.html Be afraid: China is on the path to global technology dominance
PUBLISHED : Friday, 24 March, 2017, 10:14am
UPDATED : Friday, 24 March, 2017, 10:56pm
David Dodwell
I have often jested that the main difference between the United States and China is not that one is capitalist and the other communist. Rather, it is that one is run by lawyers and the other by engineers.Nowhere is this truer than in the astonishing “catch-up” occurring on the mainland in the explosion of digital technologies and their application to the daily lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese consumers. As long as China is governed by engineers, I reckon this breakneck transformation will shock, intimidate and challenge us for decades to come. Ask people in the US or Europe about Chinese technology and most will still cast a dismissive smile and say China remains home of the cheap and cheerful copycat stuff that fills Walmart shelves. The dangerous naivity of this view was brought home forcefully at our APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) meetings last year – the first in San Francisco and the second in Shenzhen. The first thing we noticed was that our internet worked noticeably faster in Shenzhen than around San Francisco. The second was that our Chinese colleagues were paying for everything via AliPay on their smartphones. In awe of the smart technologies on display at PayPal, Google and Dolby sound studios, we were blown away by Huawei, where 40 per cent of its 170,000 staff are working on pure research, and the foundations being are being laid for roll-out of 5G across the whole of China by 2020 … for more, go to http://www.scmp.com/business/global-economy/article/2081771/be-afraid-china-path-global-technology-dominance