Porque no cuajan los indicadores occidentales con los chinos ?

Published Jan 16, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Jan 25, 2010 No Chance Against China By Martin Jacques | NEWSWEEK Google's defeat foretells the day when Beijing rules the world. The blunt truth is that most Western forecasters have been wrong about China for the past 30 years. They have claimed that Chinese economic growth was exaggerated, that a big crisis was imminent, that state controls would fade away, and that exposure to global media, notably the Internet, would steadily undermine the Communist Party's authority. The reason why China forecasting has such a poor track record is that Westerners constantly invoke the model and experience of the West to explain China, and it is a false prophet. Until we start trying to understand China on its own terms, rather than as a Western-style nation in the making, we will continue to get it wrong. The Google affair tells us much about what China is and what it will be like. The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled. Google's mission, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," has clashed with the age-old presumption of Chinese rulers of the need and responsibility to control. In this battle, there will be only one winner: China. Google will be obliged either to accept Chinese regulations or exit the world's largest Internet market, with serious consequences for its long-term global ambitions. This is a metaphor for our times: America's most dynamic company cannot take on the Chinese government—even on an issue like free and open information—and win. Moreover, as China becomes increasingly important as a market and player, what happens to the Internet in China will have profound consequences for the Internet globally. It is already clear that the Google model of a free and open Internet, an exemplar of the American idea of the future, cannot and will not prevail. China's Internet will continue to be policed and controlled, information filtered, sites prohibited, noncompliant search engines excluded, and sensitive search words disallowed. And where China goes, others, also informed by different values, are already and will follow. The Internet, far from being a great big unified global space, will be fragmented and segmented. Another Western shibboleth about the future will thereby fall. It will not signal the end of the free flow of information—notwithstanding all the controls, the Internet has transformed the volume and quality of information available to Chinese citizens—but it will take place more on Chinese than Western terms. If we want to understand the future, we need to go back to the drawing board. China—as we can see with increasing clarity—is destined to become the world's largest economy and is likely in time to far outdistance the U.S. This process will remorselessly shift the balance of power in China's favor. Just as once a large share of the American market was a precondition for a firm being a major global player, this mantle will increasingly be assumed instead by the Chinese market, except to a far greater extent because its population is four times the size. Furthermore, China's expanding economic clout means that its government is enjoying rapidly growing global authority. It can even take on Google and be sure of victory. Facing up to the fact that China is very different from the West, that it simply does not work or think like us, is proving far more difficult. A classic illustration is the West's failure to understand the strength and durability of the Chinese state, which defies all predictions of its demise, remains omnipresent in Chinese lives, still owns most major firms, and proves remarkably adept at finding new ways to counter the influence of the U.S. global media. Western observers typically explain the intrusiveness of the Chinese government in terms of paranoia—and in a huge and diverse country the rulers have always seen instability as an ever-present danger—but there is a deeper reason why the state enjoys such a high-profile role in Chinese society. It is seen by the Chinese not as an alien presence to be constantly pruned back, as in the West, especially the U.S., but as the embodiment and guardian of society. Rather than alien, it is seen as an intimate, in the manner of the head of the household. It might seem an extraordinary proposition, but the Chinese state enjoys a remarkable legitimacy among its people, greater than in Western societies. And the reason lies deep in China's history. China may call itself a nation-state (although only for the past century), but in essence it is a civilization-state dating back at least two millennia. Maintaining the unity of Chinese civilization is regarded as the most important political priority and seen as the sacred task of the state, hence its unique role: there is no Western parallel. Chinese modernity will not resemble Western modernity, and a world dominated by China will not resemble our own. One consequence is already apparent in the developing world: the state is back in fashion; the Washington Consensus has been eclipsed. In this new world, Chinese ways of thinking—from Confucian values and their notion of the state to the family and parenting—will become increasingly influential. Google's fate is a sign of the world to come, and the sooner we come to appreciate the nature of a world run by China, the better we will be able to deal with it. Jacques is the author of When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. © 2010 Open Article at Newsweek´s WebSite. About Newsweek, Inc. Contact Us User Agreement Privacy Policy Rights and Reprint Sales. © 2009 Newsweek, Inc.

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Internet libre vs China.

Jan 14, 2010 Taking Down China's 'Great Firewall' Daniel Lyons Why Google's stand is a public-relations win and a solid blow to Beijing's policy of censorship. To many in Silicon Valley, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who "get it," and those who don't. The people who get it are the ones who understand that the Internet is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the history of the human race, a wave so huge and so powerful that the only way to cope with it is to jump on and hope to make money building a new world once the tsunami has laid waste to the old one. Those who don't get it are the ones who try to fight the Internet wave, or slow it down. Entire industries fit that description: movies, music, publishing, real estate, cable-TV providers, operators of mobile-phone networks—the list goes on. Now, at the top of the list, goes China. That is the message Google is sending by saying it will no longer comply with China's demand that its search results be censored. Suddenly China is being called out for its transgressions, depicted not just as evil but also, worse yet, as backward and stupid. This is all kind of incredible, because China is proving itself to be so advanced and sophisticated at next-generation technologies, from solar panels to high-speed trains. Yet when it comes to the Internet, China does not get it. Hacking into servers so clumsily that you get caught? Throwing up filters? Choking off information? Hobbling search engines so that people get a censored version of reality? This is idiotic. China is fighting the Internet. And like everyone else who fights the Internet, China will lose. People in China can already get around the "Great Firewall," using anonymizers like Tor, which lets you create virtual tunnels so you can sidestep filters and communicate anonymously over the Internet. The shift to the mobile Web creates even more freedom. These days everybody has a smart phone, which means everyone now has a video camera and a virtual satellite truck right in their pocket. How do you stop that? The government in Iran shut down mainstream media, but news and pictures keep flowing out via Twitter. Yes, a government can shut down servers that are passing Twitter messages. But then hackers route around the roadblock by setting up proxy servers. The government can hunt those down and block them, but hackers just set up new ones. Technology guru Stewart Brand once said, "Information wants to be free," and I believe this means "free as in freedom," rather than "free as in beer." Information will not allow itself to be penned up. I suppose in theory a government could shut down all cell-phone and landline operators and all the Internet service providers. But imagine the backlash when a population gets dragged back into the Dark Ages. In other words, you can't win. This is what people meant, back in the 1990s, when they said the Internet would be a disruptive force on a global scale. To be sure, Google should never have made its Faustian bargain with China in the first place. Google rationalized the deal by saying Chinese users were better off getting a limited version of Google than getting no Google at all. My sense is that this claim was rubbish and that Google just wanted to make money. But four years later Google has made little headway in China and is likely losing a great deal of money there. Google has only half the market share of Baidu, a Chinese search engine, and can't seem to gain ground. So maybe Google just wants to get out of China, and the censorship battle provides cover for a retreat. Google declined to comment on that point and directed NEWSWEEK to the company's blog post on the matter.* What's the sense of pushing into a market where the government lets you sell only a half-baked version of your product? It's as if U.S. automakers could sell cars in China only if they agreed to ship them with one wheel missing. On top of that, the Chinese started hacking into Google's servers, trying to dig up information about Chinese human-rights activists. At which point the Google guys just said, "Enough." But here's a theory. Maybe the Google guys weren't really shocked by China's hacking. They shouldn't have been, since all countries, including our own, are hacking the Internet all the time and using the Web to spy on people. So maybe Google had this planned all along. Maybe it went along with the China deal back in 2006 figuring that it would either (a) make loads of money in China, and if so, keep quiet about the censorship; or (b) fail to create a thriving business in China, but create an opportunity to generate some positive publicity by sparking a debate about the Internet and censorship. My guess: even the smarty-pants Google geniuses probably don't think that far ahead. But anyway, the debate is one we need to have. The Internet is bigger than any one country—even a country as big as China. Calling out China as someone who "doesn't get it" is a way of putting the rest of the world on notice. *Update: After this story originally posted, a Google spokesperson told NEWSWEEK that its decision to possibly leave the country had nothing to do with providing cover. "That's totally untrue," says Google. "We actually just had our best quarter ever in China." Daniel Lyons is also the author of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs and Dog Days: A Novel. © 2010 Open Article at Newsweek´s WebSite. About Newsweek, Inc. Contact Us User Agreement Privacy Policy Rights and Reprint Sales. © 2009 Newsweek, Inc.

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Las mejores ciudades para hacer negocios en Colombia

02/16/2010 Las mejores ciudades para hacer negocios en Colombia El informe anual de Doing Business reveló que en las ciudades intermedias es más fácil hacer negocios que las grandes. Manizales, Ibagué y Pereira encabezan la lista. El informe anual de Doing Business reveló que en las ciudades intermedias es más fácil hacer negocios que las grandes. Manizales, Ibagué y Pereira encabezan la lista. Como lo anticipó Dinero.com, el informe Doing Business en Colombia 2010 encontró que a las ciudades intermedias les va mejor que a las ciudades grandes en términos de facilidad de hacer negocios. Las ciudades donde es más sencillo hacer negocios en el país son Manizales, Ibagué y Pereira. Así lo establece la calsificación que reveló el Banco Mundial, autor del informe. Manizales, que en el informe de 2008 ocupó el segundo lugar, pasó a liderar la clasificación. En el otro lado del espectro, las capitales donde es más difícil hacer negocios son Villevicencio, Cali y Cartagena. Doing Business Colombia 2010, mide cómo las regulaciones afectan seis etapas de la vida de una empresa: apertura de empresa, obtención de permisos de construcción, registro de propiedades, pago de impuestos, comercio transfronterizo y cumplimiento de contratos. "Los gobierno departamentales han estado reforzando sus políticas. Resaltamos la buenas prácticas de Neiva que anteriormente se ubicaba en los últimos lugares y ahora está en la mitad de la tabla. Neiva ha organizado un comité antitrámites que se ha encargado de supervisar los procesos", dijo la vicepresidenta de Servicios de Asesoría de la Corporación Financiera Internacional, IFC, Rachel Kyte. El Director de Planeación Nacional, Esteban Piedrahita, invitó a las autoridades de otros centros urbanos para que emulen a las que están liderando los procesos que las hacen más competitivas y favorecen el clima de los negocios. "Queremos impulsar a las ciudades mas rezagadas por medio de la asesoria de las que ocuparon los primeros lugares", señaló el Director. A diferencia de la primera versión en la que se incluyeron 13 ciudades, el informe presentado este martes agrupa a 21 ciudades, dentro de las cuales Bogotá ocupó el lugar 12, Medellín el 16, Barranquilla el 17 y Cali el número 20. Bucaramanga que en 2008 alcanzó el tercer puesto descendió al 18. Más resultados En materia de la apertura de una empresa, la ciudad en la que esta tarea es más sencilla es Neiva y la más complicada, Tunja. En cuanto a la obtención de licencias de construcción, la mejor es Popayán. En cuanto a la facilidad que existe para hacer cumplir un contrato, el informe Doing Business 2010 pone en la cabeza a Manizales y Valledupar y como las dos peores a Bogotá y Cartagena. El informe muestra cómo hay una tendencia clara a que las ciudades intermedias aparezcan en los primeros lugares de la tabla. Esto, porque en estas localidades hay menos congestión con relación a los trámites. El estudio analizó, como lo hizo el año pasado, las regulaciones comerciales desde la perspectiva de una pequeña o mediana empresa doméstica. El informe compara 21 ciudades, 8 ciudades más que el primer estudio publicado. Las ciudades son: Armenia, Barranquilla, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cali, Cartagena, Cúcuta, Ibagué, Manizales, Medellín, Montería, Neiva, Pasto, Pereira, Popayán, Riohacha, Santa Marta, Sincelejo, Tunja, Valledupar y Villavicencio. En cuanto a transporte transfronterizo, hay avances importantes. El tiempo para exportar productos a través de Cartagena bajó un 40% en los últimos dos años. Pasó de 24 días a 14 días. El informe es producido por el Banco Mundial y la IFC en colaboración con la Universidad de los Andes, con el apoyo del Departamento Nacional de Planeación, el Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo, la Confederación Colombiana de Cámaras de Comercio de Colombia, la Agencia de los Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional, Usaid, y el Secretariado de Estado de Economía Suizo, Seco. El informe también señala que para mejorar la competitividad de los departamentos, se debe hacer un esfuerzo por fortalecer las comisiones regionales de competitividad para difundir las buenas prácticas de manejo de los negocios. Se trata de darles la oportunidad a los que están haciendo bien las cosas, que le enseñen a las que no lo están haciendo de la mejor manera. Escalafón de la Facilidad para Hacer Negocios en Colombia 2010 Manizales, Caldas Ibagué, Tolima Pereira, Risaralda Sincelejo, Sucre Valledupar, Cesar Santa Marta, Magdalena Armenia, Quindío Popayán, Cauca Pasto, Nariño Tunja, Boyacá Neiva, Huila Bogotá, Distrito Capital Riohacha, Guajira Montería, Cordoba Cúcuta, Norte de Santander Medellín, Antioquia Barranquilla, Atlántico Bucaramanga, Santander Villavicencio, Meta Cali, Valle del Cauca Cartagena, Bolívar Abrir artículo en el Sitio Web de la Revista Dinero Dinero.com © 2008. Todos los derechos reservados. Está prohibida la reproducción total o parcial de la página. COPYRIGHT © 2010 DePapaya.com