China's strategy in Korean peninsula
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yes this was a quite desperate attempt!
Jura The idiot
General
Ultra
Junior Member
Well, now it came true. China don't need to buy from Japan anymore. I am curious as just how long before we see Japan's pen and ball bearing manufacturers crash and burn.
And obviously you don't know very much do you? You don't understand basic economics one bit.
Not only Japan now lose a huge market in China, China WILL NOW DIRECTLY COMPETES with Japan on world market, it won't be long before all of them get priced out of the market as usual.
Finally, China manufactures a ballpoint pen all by itself
By Adam Taylor
Updated 19 January 2017 — 11:56am first published at 6:25am
Chinese President Xi Jinping made headlines this week with a speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos that passionately . But closer to home, a less dramatic story may paint a more complicated and nuanced picture of China's role in the global economy.
This story involves something as simple as the ballpoint pen - yes, that humble device you may well have lying around your desk or collecting dust at the bottom of your bag - and China's long and frustrating quest to manufacture it domestically.
China's first ballpoint pen
It produces about 38 billion ballpoint pens a year, but China has never, until now, been able to produce its complicated tip.
This month, that quest has finally been fulfilled, and Chinese state media is all over it. Here's just one example of the coverage, from the English-language Twitter account of news agency Xinhua.
"China has developed its own ballpoint pen tips, ending a long-term reliance on imported ones."
To anyone outside of the ballpoint pen manufacturing world, it might seem hard to understand what, exactly, is so surprising about this development? China already produces 38 billion ballpoint pens a year, according to China Daily, which is around 80 per cent of all ballpoint pens in the world. That's a lot of pens, but there was a catch: China had long been unable to produce a high quality version of the most important part of the pen, its tip.
The tip of a ballpoint pen is what makes it a ballpoint pen. At the tip, a freely rotating ball is held in a small socket which connects it to an ink reservoir that allows the pen to write or draw lines. Manufacturing a ballpoint pen tip that can write comfortably for a long period of time requires high-precision machinery and precisely thin steel, but for years China was unable to match those crafted by foreign companies.
While there were over 3000 companies manufacturing pens in China, none had their own high-end technology for the tip. Instead, roughly 90 per cent of the pen tips and refills, too, were imported from Japan, Germany and Switzerland, according to Chinese state media. This cost the industry $US17.3 million a year, according to the China National Light Industry Council.
China's inability to produce a complete, high-quality ballpoint pen came to widespread attention in 2015, when Prime Minister Li Keqiang singled out the products at a seminar in Beijing, noting that his writing was "rough" when he used Chinese-made ballpoint pens. For Li, China's failure to manufacture a complete ballpoint pen was indicative of the Chinese economy's weaknesses. "That's the real situation facing us," Li said at the time. "We cannot make ballpoint pens with a smooth writing function."
The Chinese premier's comments caused consternation in China's pen industry - which was, understandably, not used to being the topic of mainstream political conversation. These pen companies were once happy to manufacture shoddy pens which were sometimes exported abroad as cheap knockoffs of better brands. Now, they were being told they were expected to do something more.
"In the past, the government praised the big companies that export the most and have the biggest profits," Huang Xinghua, president of the Platinum Pen company in Shanghai told NPR's Marketplace soon after. "They seldom praise companies that truly make good quality pens."
Li's comments apparently sparked action, however, and this week, after a reported five years of research and development, the state-owned company Taiyuan Iron and Steel Group (TISCO) announced that it would begin mass-producing ballpoint pen tips and replace imports within two years.
The completely Chinese ballpoint pen is no doubt a symbol of Chinese innovation. It's far from alone. Over recent years, China has caught up to other industrialised nations when it comes to technological advances - take a look at its booming tech industry for evidence.
But at the same time, the saga of the ballpoint pen shows that China's ideas about free trade and innovation are far from simple.
Consider this: The ballpoint pen innovation only took place after concerted government intervention. This is, in part, because in a country with lax intellectual property laws, spending money on research and development with little tangible benefit isn't economical. Worse still, China's powerful but notoriously overproductive steel industry, rather than the pen industry itself, controls this technology.
Many observers couldn't miss the potential problems. "Long term, TISCO's standard will probably result in a de facto domestic monopoly on pen tips, thereby replacing the foreign monopoly that China was originally trying to break up," Adam Minter noted over at Bloomberg View this week.
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PiSigma
"the engineer"
Now now... Don't insult chimpanzees. Plenty of chimp can learn to operate a computer. This flying dumb dumb below in the lower life forms category.
Ultra
Junior Member
You can only hope. NK only comes to pay a visit when they needed something from China.
They seem to be fairly oblivious about China from what I can read. Kim Jong-un is even anti-chinese (purge/killed his uncle who is pro-china and incidents of border guards who shot chinese) until he got threaten by Trump. Nothing put you in perspective front and centre when you are threaten by total nuclear annhilation.
I think North Korea in general and Kim Jong-un is friendly to China only by neccessity. There is no real friendship whatsoever.
PikeCowboy
Junior Member
I've read reports to this effect too many times, just how many f'n ballpoints does australia export out of its millions of tonnes of iron ores. - you know, to warrant an australian reporter to stand up and say that with a straight face.
How exactly, also, is replacing a foreign monopoly with a domestic manufacturer a problem for china? That proposition really begs for some elaboration but its spoken as a fact with the same simplicity and natural right by which a piece of turd falls out of someone's ass.
Well, if that is your way of seeing relations between countries, then I am not aware of any relationship any better than that. I mean it is all the same.
Just give you some perspectives,
1. Are you aware of the fierce anti-American demonstrations of SK students during the 1970s and the 1980s before the democratization? Those went pretty violent. You know the Americans did save SK from the blink of annihilation by the NK in 1950s, but still just less than 20 years later the young South Koreans whose parents all experienced the war turned their back against their saviors.
2. You may be very aware of the split of Soviet and China in the 1960s after the "brotherly relationship", now the two are friends again.
Nobody is a friend as true brothers by blood, that is a fact. But everyone need a friend and try to develop that friendship closer. The effort is the most important thing. Being cynical to that effort is unnecessary, disconnected to reality and harmful to oneself.
P.S. even brothers by blood may hurt each other dearly. I have seen that played to one of my friends.
A pro-US unified Korea is far more threatening to China's fundamental security interests than anything NK has done or will do.
There is no permanent friends, only permanent interests. (True for everyone including US allies)
Even after Tang dynasty and Silla allied together to defeat Goguryeo and Baekje, the Tang and Silla went to war and Tang tried to annex Silla itself.
The second time China intervenes to save NK's butt again, a vast swath of northeast China will have access to Tumen river basin and by extension the Sea of Japan as geographical compensation.
No permanent allies, just permanent interests.
China will never allow a pro-US unified Korea, and never give up NK to US-SK alliance.
There is no permanent friends, only permanent interests. (True for everyone including US allies)
Even after Tang dynasty and Silla allied together to defeat Goguryeo and Baekje, the Tang and Silla went to war and Tang tried to annex Silla itself.
The second time China intervenes to save NK's butt again, a vast swath of northeast China will have access to Tumen river basin and by extension the Sea of Japan as geographical compensation.
No permanent allies, just permanent interests.
China will never allow a pro-US unified Korea, and never give up NK to US-SK alliance.
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