The Middle Kingdom June 5, 2007
Posted by ianmartinez in : What's New?, Policy, Standards , trackbackThe word “China” as we say it in English is, more properly, “Zhongguo” in Mandarin. The first character zhōng (中), is translated “middle” or “central,” and guó (国 or 國) is “country” or “state.” Early Western missionaries to China translated the term “Middle Kingdom,” which some have said reflected their opinon that the Chinese culture seemed to revolve around the king. The term is multifacted, however, dating as it does to ancient times. “The Middle Kingdom” referred to the “Central States” along the Yellow River valley, but often it was land under Chinese control, or the metropolitan area surrounding the capital, or sometimes even just cultural China generally — doesn’t every culture think it’s at the center of things — and was not associated with a particular political entity.
It’s a powerful term in the context of China’s rich political, economic, and technological histories. Thousands of years old and still kicking, the Chinese have always been innovators. China notably gave birth to what British historian Joseph Needham called “the Four Great Inventions” — The compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing.
Think about it. Yeah, gunpowder was a big one. Empires grew and fell on that one. But the other three! Civilization grew from those technologies.
The other three were among the very roots of human communications. The compass allowed man to orient himself in the physical world and to create universal points of reference for all. Paper-making was the first time humankind had a readily reproducible place to store information. And printing was a revolutionarily uniform, efficient way to distribute that information.
It might be a strained metaphor to call ancient China the first Silicon Valley. But not so strained. With all those new techniques for conveying and archiving knowledge — not to mention the means to blow the other guy up — Chinese imperial dynasties regularly lasted for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Chinese cities became centers for trade, culture, the arts and new ideas. It’s no wonder they called themselves “The Middle Kingdom.”
Well, China may not be the center for designing new communication technologies anymore, but it’s dead center in the world of communications nonetheless. Between the countless manufacturers located on and just off mainland China and the literally hundreds of millions of citizens wating to connect to the world, all global communications discussions get to China eventually. And certain issues surrounding China-US and China-world trade relationships will become major policy issues for tech and telecom vendors in the coming months.
Will China stick to its own government-mandated CDMA standard and continue to freeze out international vendors and the know-how and cleverness they bring? Or will it move toward international consensus and adopt the global standard, furthering the revolution in human connectivity it helped move forward? And who will decide?
These questions make USITO’s China program at NXTcomm all the more interesting. Will there be progress on a standard? How much business will be fostered in this newly-networked environment? In a way, it’s not about China at all. It’s about whether several countries with radically different histories can use the technoloies available to them to bridge the ever shrinking gap over an ever-growing, highly globalized center.
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