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News on China's scientific and technological development.
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escobar
Brigadier
China will formally employ its first home-made, deep-sea semi-submersible drilling platform in the east part of South China Sea on May 9, marking the beginning of the country's deepwater oil strategy, the National Energy Administration said.
Ocean Oil 981 will be used to drill the Liwan 6-1-1 well, which has water depth of 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) and designed well depth of 2,371 metres (7,780 feet), the administration said in a report on its website (?????) dated April 28.
The drill is scheduled to take 56.5 days.
Ocean Oil 981, the construction of which took six years, was towed to the east part of South China Sea on Feb. 21 and drilled the Liuhua 29-2-1 well in a trial operation, the administration said.
The Lianhua 29-2-1 has designed well depth of 3,230 metres in ocean waters with depth of 753.3 metres.
State-run China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) is the owner and operator of the deep-sea rig.
escobar
Brigadier
China will further industrialize the use of a new material developed with the help of nanotechnology to ensure the safety of its power grids, according to a Wednesday statement from the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNT).
The NCNT said the material has undergone strict testing and technical evaluations and will be used to solve the problem of flashover, a phenomenon in which energized conductors inadvertently come into contact with other conductors or a grounded surface. Flashover has been a persistent safety problem in China's power grids.
Other projects based around the use of the new material are in the research phase and will eventually be applied to China's power grids on a large scale, the NCNT said.
The material was created in 2009 after three years of research by the NCNT, the Institute of Process Engineering under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the China Electric Power Research Institute.
escobar
Brigadier
Zhang Jie, a Chinese physicist, has been selected to be a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), according to a Wednesday announcement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Zhang, president of Shanghai Communications University and a CAS academic, has made important contributions to research concerning high-energy physics, laser fusion and X-ray laser technology.
Zhang is also a member of the German Academy of Sciences, the Third World Academy of Sciences and the Royal Academy of Engineering of the United Kingdom.
Zhang was one of 21 foreign associates, or nonvoting members of the academy who have citizenship outside of the United States, selected by the NAS this year. NAS membership is one of the highest honors given to U.S. scientists and engineers.
Professor V.W.W. Yam from the chemistry department of the University of Hong Kong was also elected as a foreign associate.
escobar
Brigadier
As a research achievement of the key technologies and important projects of the mass memory system of the "863 Program of the 11th Five-Year Plan," the PB-level (1PB=1000TB, 1TB=1000GB) high-performance mass memory system independently developed by the Inspur Group passed the national examination and was accepted in March.
It is the first memory system of the multi-controller and full-exchanging structure successfully developed by China and indicates that China has made an important breakthrough in the high-end memory realm. It has broken foreign companies' long-term technological and market monopolies and made China the third country mastering core technologies of the high-end memory realm after the United States and Japan.
Connecting with national security
"The mass memory system is an important footstone for the national security and connects with the national information security, economic security and social security. Therefore, China must be able develop and control it independently." Senior vice president of the Inspur Group Wang Endong said that, in the areas involving the national interests, people's livelihood and national strategic security, the memory systems for key operations must be reliable, secure and controllable. This issue is especially important in such areas as the finance, telecom, energy, government and national defense.
In recent years, as new-generation information technologies, such as the Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things, are growing sharply, the data scale and application scale of the customer are also rapidly expanding and accumulating. The mass memory system is used more widely and the Internet's demand for the memory capacity doubles every three months. Under this background, users' requirements on the performance, usability and expansibility of the mass memory system are strict and urgent. The PB-level mass memory system is a perfect tool for dealing with this challenge.
"For a long period, the mass memory market of China has been monopolized by foreign IT giants." Wang told the reporter that, taking the year of 2007 as an example, foreign IT giants occupied 90 percent of China's domestic mass memory market, the 10 percent left was also mostly occupied by products of foreign brands produced by Chinese factories, and except for a few low-end products, there was almost zero independent Chinese mass memory product in the domestic market."
Therefore, China arranged the special "key technologies of the mass memory system" project in the information realm of the "863 Program" of the "11th Five-Year Plan."
Overcoming barriers in three years
After making hard efforts for three years, the Inspur Group successfully developed the eight-controller system structure for the first time in China. It was an important breakthrough of China in the mass memory area and has made the Inspur Group the fourth company of the world being able to develop the mass memory system independently after the EMC, IBM and Hitachi.
According to sources, the mass memory system developed by the Inspur Group has been adopted by the China Centre for Resources Satellite Data and Application (CCRSDA) and the Jinan National Supercomputing Center (JNSC). The operation system of the CCRSDA receives and processes data from seven satellites and processes 6TB of data per day and 2PB per year. On the fully-domestic-made thousand-trillion-time supercomputer "Sunway Blue-Light," a 2.3PB Inspur mass memory system is installed. Its broadband speed is 200GB per second. The system has successfully overcome the memory bottleneck of the high-performance computing.
Inspur mass memory system
Its data management scale is as high as 32PB, equal to memory space of 6 million episodes of TV series
It can manage a billion-level number of documents and a single system can store picture materials of the full population of China. It can guarantee the successive 1,000-day document increase of an Internet enterprise (increasing by 1 million documents per day).
Its data transmission broadband has a speed of 64M per second, which can support simultaneous data uploads of 13,000 monitoring cameras (cameras of a medium-size city) and can store 14 high-definition movies in a second.
escobar
Brigadier
THREE hours’ drive from Beijing, Tianjin is home to the new assembly plant of Great Wall Motors. A banner along its outside wall declares the company’s motto: “Improving little by little every day”. Inside, signs everywhere urge workers to be inspired by the “Toyota Production System spirit”. Machines seem to outnumber people: labour is no longer cheap in coastal China. Banks of beefy robot welders, constrained in wire cages as if to stop them escaping, chug away relentlessly, making the human welders alongside look puny.
The Tianjin plant will eventually turn out up to 1m vehicles a year, adding to the 500,000 that the three plants in Great Wall’s home province of Hebei, to the west, can produce. The company, like every other domestic and foreign carmaker in China, is betting that what is now by far the world’s biggest automobile market—18.5m vehicles were sold there last year, compared with 13.1m in America—will keep on growing. In 2010 sales grew by a whopping 32%, boosted by a state stimulus scheme. Last year, after its expiry, growth was a meagre 2.5%. But it is expected to rebound to maybe 5-10% this year.
Great Wall only just makes the top-ten list of Chinese carmakers (see chart 1). But already its pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are being driven in Australia, Italy and several poorer countries. Its Steed double-cab pickup has just become the first Chinese-branded car to go on sale in Britain, for thousands of pounds less than the Japanese models it will compete against; Autocar magazine reckons it stacks up pretty well against its rivals.
As happened when Japan and South Korea set themselves up as carmaking nations, Chinese motors have had to endure derision and rejection over their design, safety and reliability. That now seems to be changing, even among Chinese buyers, for whom a foreign car has long been a status symbol. (Among the hottest current political gossip in China is the story of a Porsche-driving princeling’s speeding tickets.)
At the Beijing motor show, which wrapped up this week, the consensus among pundits was that the latest Chinese-branded models were a notable improvement on the shoddy knock-offs of Western cars exhibited at previous shows. At Great Wall’s stand, a young man in a leather jacket and sneakers inspects an SUV. His father already has an Audi A6, a big German saloon, he says, but has sent him to find a family runabout. And the Chinese brands seem worth a look now.
More than half of the cars and light vans sold in China have foreign badges on their bonnets (see chart 2). Most of these are made in joint-venture factories in China in which local firms have a stake but their foreign partners provide the technology and designs. Great Wall is one of the few Chinese makers to lack such a foreign partner.
Also unlike most domestic firms, it is largely privately owned, so it has not enjoyed the largesse the state and its banks bestow on the firms it owns. But lacking such crutches has made it try harder. Wenlin Xing, an executive at Great Wall, says it spent five years setting up a dealer network in Australia, and ten years in Britain.
A success, and a failure
Until the late 1970s China was making fewer than 3,000 passenger cars a year—barely enough to ferry the political elite between banquets. In 1989 it exported just six cars. Now, its motor industry supports millions of jobs. Some of China’s leading makers—including SAIC, Geely, Chery and JAC as well as Great Wall—are beginning to establish their brands overseas, especially in fast-growing emerging economies. Last year they exported almost 900,000 cars.
So, a fantastic success, then? Not when measured against the Chinese government’s ambitions. As described in a new book, “Designated Drivers: How China Plans to Dominate the Global Auto Industry”, by Greg Anderson, state planners intended, by 2010, to have “three or four large, globally competitive auto firms” like America and Japan, and for these to have their own successful brands and technology. Instead, the book notes, so far “even the most innovative of China’s independent automakers have relied heavily on copying, cost control and public relations to give the appearance of innovation.”
Japan and South Korea got their carmaking industries going by shutting foreigners out of their domestic markets, giving domestic brands a captive audience to practise on. China let in the foreign carmakers, but on condition that they worked with local partners. The idea was that the Chinese makers would by now have learned the knack of producing world-beating cars, and presumably be in a position to dump their foreign brides.
One reason this has not happened, explains Mr Anderson, is that the bosses of state-owned Chinese firms treat their jobs as stepping stones to higher political office, moving on to a senior party role after five years or so. Thus their motivation is short-term empire-building rather than fostering research and development to lay the foundations for long-term success.
Safer, but not yet desirable
Surveys of foreign- and Chinese-branded cars’ mechanical faults, by J.D. Power, a market researcher, show that the local brands are now closing the reliability gap. Earlier attempts to export Chinese-branded cars to Europe, a few years ago, ended in disaster after their dismal failure in crash tests was broadcast on YouTube. But last November models from SAIC and Geely won high marks in crash tests by a European safety agency. Even so, changing motorists’ perceptions of the inferiority of domestically branded goods will take time.
Some of the big Chinese makers have realised that there is no point reinventing the wheel when there is so much foreign technology and design talent for sale. SAIC bought some remnants of Rover, Britain’s former state carmaker, and is using its designers to create promising new models. Geely bought Volvo from Ford, and can now combine its own Chinese market access and strong supply chain with Volvo’s technology and image-making savvy. BAIC is basing its new models on technology bought from Saab, another (now defunct) Swedish premium brand.
As Japanese and Korean carmakers have done, Chinese carmakers are also hiring European designers to help make their models distinctive. Styling, rather than technology or product quality, is now their weakest point, reckons Huaibin Lin of IHS, a forecaster. No Chinese firm has yet developed what those in the motor trade call a “design language” of its own (think of the unmistakable appearance of a BMW).
Chinese-branded cars may be getting better; but so are foreign-badged ones. The rich world’s carmakers are loading their models with ever fancier navigation, entertainment and safety gear. Chinese car-buyers, armed with smartphones and computers, scour the world to find out what is the best on offer, says Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s Asia-Pacific boss. And they insist on having it. Meanwhile the global giants’ adoption of standard “platforms”, on which a wide range of models can be built, combined with China’s rising wage bills, mean that Chinese makers’ cost advantages are fading. So Chinese-branded cars, having failed to reach a 50% share in their home market, may continue a recent trend of ceding ground to the foreigners.
China’s domestic car market, like America’s, is dominated by a handful of firms. But below them are dozens of smaller makers, which are suffering as new-car prices fall (they are already down by 30% since 2004) and stricter emissions rules require big investments in technology. It would make sense to let the weakest firms fail or be taken over. Mr Anderson notes that the government has repeatedly set out to consolidate the industry. But both national and local officials fear that the resulting job losses would cause instability, so progress has been modest.
No one knows how big China’s car market will eventually be. Estimates vary from 25m sales a year to three times that. Demand may be restrained if growing traffic congestion outpaces even China’s vigorous road-building programme. The rising cost of imported oil may force the government to do more to discourage road use; though so far its grand plans to switch from petrol to electric propulsion have gone nowhere (see article).
The Chinese government’s dream of dominating the world car market still seems distant. But every year more and more Chinese consumers find they are prosperous enough to afford a set of wheels, and no obstacle will stop them from buying one. The battle to make China more mobile has barely begun.
broadsword
Brigadier
Chinese cars need to get 4 out of 5 stars in the NHTSA ratings before they can think of making a dent, no pun intended. The Great Wall Steed is already hugely successful in Italy, with its interior plastics praised in reviews but its safety rating is not up there yet. A few other Chinese makes models do score 4 out of 5 in the European NCAP, one example being the Geely Emgrand.
escobar
Brigadier
The spring session of the biannual Canton Fair, or the 111th China Import and Export Fair, closed on Saturday, with export transactions decreased for the first time since 2009.
The value of export deals dropped by 2.3 percent year-on-year to 36.03 billion U.S. dollars, or down 4.8 percent than the figure at the autumn session of the fair, said Liu Jianjun, spokesman with the fair.This is the first volume decrease since the spring of 2009 as economic crisis hit the world from 2008, according to Liu.
Debt crisis from European Union countries and tough job market in the United States were among the factors that have caused the decrease, he said.
"Although we have seen sharp export deal increase in new markets, such as in Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa and other African countries, it cannot make up for the huge shortfall from European and American markets," said Liu.
The purchasers attending the fair reached 210,000, setting a new record since the fair's debut in 1957.