News on China's scientific and technological development.

Now this is interesting, the Japanese always touted their HSR as the safest and of the highest quality. And now this

Substandard metal parts used in Japan's bullet trains
by Sherisse Pham October 12, 2017: 7:36 AM ET

) were used in the manufacturing of several bullet trains.

The scandal came to light Sunday, when Kobe Steel said employees had falsified data about the strength and durability of thousands of tons of aluminum and copper parts sold between September 2016 and August 2017. They did not meet specifications agreed with customers.

Central Japan Railway (

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), which operates high speed trains between Tokyo and Osaka, found aluminum parts used in the truck -- the part that connects the wheels to train cars -- failed to meet company standards, said spokesman Atsuo Utano. A total of 310 tested parts were found tobe substandard.



West Japan Railway (

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) also foundsubstandardKobealuminum parts in seven high speed trains made by Hitachi and Nippon Sharyo, according to West Japan Railway spokesman Shugo Nishimura. West Japan operates bullet trains between Osaka and Hakata.

Both companies said the components do not pose any safety risks, and that they are considering replacing them during routine maintenance.




Kobe Steel's admission this week sent shock waves through the global automotive and aerospace supply chains. Toyota (), Honda (), Nissan () and Mazda () have all confirmed to CNNMoney that they bought substandard parts from Kobe Steel, as did plane maker Mitsubishi Heavy ().



Subaru () has also confirmed that it bought affected products. Subaru and Mitsubishi are major suppliers to Boeing ().

A Boeing spokesman has said the company was inspecting its supply chain for any substandard components. Ford () and GM () said Thursday they are investigating any potential impact.

The fallout will likely continue. Kobe Steel President and CEO Hiroya Kawasaki told reporters on Thursday that there may be other cases in which data has been fabricated.

The Japanese government is demanding answers.

A government spokesman told CNNMoney that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has ordered Kobe Steel "to report the result of safety checks within around two weeks, and conduct a thorough investigation of the reason for data fabrication and prevention measures within a month."

-- Chie Kobayashi and Daniel Shane contributed to this report.



CNNMoney (Hong Kong)

Beidou surpasses GPS In China

BeiDou surpasses GPS in China
By Chu Daye Source:Global Times Published: 2017/10/12 22:03:39

Widespread use in home market ensures success: experts

People look at a model of China's homegrown BeiDou Navigation Satellite System at an exhibition in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province in April. Photo: VCG

Experts said China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) has surpassed the US-developed Global Positioning System (GPS) after having made great progress in the past few years, during which the homegrown system has found widespread application on an industrial scale in both China and the global market.

Huang Haihui, an executive at the Shenzhen-listed Beijing UniStrong Science & Technology Co, said that while the relationship between BDS and GPS is not a zero-sum game, BDS has already surpassed GPS in the Chinese market in terms of the number of chips that receive signals from the system. Huang's firm, which uses BDS, is a leader in the geospatial market.

Today, a great many chips receive signals sent by both GPS and BDS for added precision. And chips that integrate BDS and GPS are sold on the market for the same price as GPS-only chips, with the entry-level chips selling at less than 10 yuan ($1.5), according to experts.

"Not only has BDS surpassed GPS in that sense, it is also advancing in the global market, in which the system can engage in a wrist-wrestling game with the latter. In the Southeast Asian market, BDS has the upper hand," Huang told the Global Times on Thursday.

Wang Bo, a leading global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) scientist with the Beijing Institute of Technology, also echoed that sentiment, saying that, in terms of industrial output value, BDS is beating GPS in the Chinese market.

According to an industry white paper, the overall output value of the GNSS and location-based services market in China reached 211.8 billion yuan in 2016, up 22.06 percent from the previous year. And for the industry's core output, BDS contributed 70 percent.

Wang said that the growth of BDS is consistent with the rapid growth of China's national strength. "Such growth is due to the urgent and immense market demand generated in China. There is a lot of new demand created in China, which does not exist in the ecosystem for GPS."

"The growth of BDS is associated with new emerging industries in China, such as mobile Internet and the Internet of Things," Wang told the Global Times on Thursday. "For instance, BDS has applications in urban underground pipeline monitoring and driver license training. Such applications are not seen with GPS."

Wang said that the two systems are different in terms of constellation, communication capability and signal frequency. And these technological differences mean that BDS can perform more functions and is more precise than GPS.

Homegrown success

BDS has been independently developed by China. It is one of the four major GNSS in the world, along with the US-developed GPS, the EU's Galileo and Russia's Global Navigation Satellite System, known as GLONASS.

With the current BDS, China aims to serve countries along the

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routes as well as other neighboring countries by 2018, and is expected to launch another 35 satellites by 2020 to provide services to global users.

China had 23 BeiDou navigation satellites in orbit by the end of 2016, while GPS had 24 satellites.

Huang said the advantages and progress of BDS came with the mass adaptation of the technology in the vast Chinese market and the growth of Chinese companies in the industry.

BDS has now become a calling card for China, similar to bullet trains, Huang said.

"In the past five years, the application of BDS has expanded from the national defense sector into a number of new sectors and industries - civilian use in particular," Huang said.

"These applications are massive in scale and spread across many industries. In agriculture, tractors in the field and drones flying over for inspection and monitoring are connected with BDS," he noted.

"At construction sites, engineering machinery is equipped with BDS. And at the consumer end, more and more handsets have chips that accommodate both GPS and BDS," Huang said.

"The competition is in many areas - in technology, the patents pool and the market scale. It is more than the competition between the two navigation systems; it is also competition between companies in the industrial chain of the navigation business," Huang said, adding that Chinese navigation firms have been expanding their global footprint via mergers and acquisitions in the past five years.

"The common belief that GPS is dominant [in the Chinese market] is just wrong," Wang said.

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the view from the vid inside of





China's newly-developed underwater glider sets national record after working 91 days without any malfunction in

Hendrik_2000 said:

Now this is interesting, the Japanese always touted their HSR as the safest and of the highest quality. And now this

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Substandard metal parts used in Japan's bullet trains
by Sherisse Pham

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October 12, 2017: 7:36 AM ET

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) were used in the manufacturing of several bullet trains.

The scandal came to light Sunday, when Kobe Steel ...

Click to expand...

... related news:
Japan's Kobe Steel scandal spreads, 500 firms affected 2017-10-15 14:25 GMT+8

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Japan's third-largest steelmaker, Kobe Steel, admitted on Friday that a snowballing falsified data scandal had affected around 500 customers and more products found involved.

The number of customers are more than twice as many as initially thought, and more than 30 foreign customers were affected, including Boeing, Airbus, General Motors, Tesla, German automaker Daimler and PSA of France, according to Japan's leading Nikkei business daily.

The company had previously admitted to falsifying quality data for products sold to some 200 clients.

"Combined with previously announced clients, it will total about 500 firms," Yoshihiko Katsukawa, a senior Kobe Steel executive, told a press conference.

"Please let us refrain from naming specific clients that have been affected. We have communicated with our customers and have discussed ways to confirm the safety of our products," he added.

Kobe Steel's CEO Hiroya Kawasaki also said at the press conference on Friday that the company had uncovered nine more types of products whose inspections had been faked or manipulated, including stainless steel wires, copper tubes and aluminum alloy wire and others.

As steel wire products accounted for 37 percent of the company’s revenues, the latest disclosure means the amount of products involved in the tampering is five times more than their count when the scandal first came into light earlier this week.

When asked about the percentage of affected products among their total sales, Kawasaki failed to give a clear answer.

"Last time, we said the affected products accounted for four percent of the total. Plus this time's disclosure. I don’t think there will be big changes in that ratio. Of course, that's my personal opinion," he said.

The new estimate comes as Kobe Steel's battered stock fell almost nine percent to finish at 805 yen (7.20 US dollars) on Friday, down more than 40 percent since the start of the week after it admitted falsifying strength and quality data for a string of products – a practice it said may have started a decade ago.

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Hendrik_2000 said:

Now this is interesting, the Japanese always touted their HSR as the safest and of the highest quality. And now this

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Substandard metal parts used in Japan's bullet trains
by Sherisse Pham

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

October 12, 2017: 7:36 AM ET

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

) were used in the manufacturing of several bullet trains.

The scandal came to light Sunday, when Kobe Steel said employees had falsified data about the strength and durability of thousands of tons of aluminum and copper parts sold between September 2016 and August 2017. They did not meet specifications agreed with customers.

Central Japan Railway (

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

), which operates high speed trains between Tokyo and Osaka, found aluminum parts used in the truck -- the part that connects the wheels to train cars -- failed to meet company standards, said spokesman Atsuo Utano. A total of 310 tested parts were found tobe substandard.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

West Japan Railway (

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) also foundsubstandardKobealuminum parts in seven high speed trains made by Hitachi and Nippon Sharyo, according to West Japan Railway spokesman Shugo Nishimura. West Japan operates bullet trains between Osaka and Hakata.

Both companies said the components do not pose any safety risks, and that they are considering replacing them during routine maintenance.

Kobe Steel's admission this week sent shock waves through the global automotive and aerospace supply chains. Toyota (

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), Honda (

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), Nissan (

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) and Mazda (

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) have all confirmed to CNNMoney that they bought substandard parts from Kobe Steel, as did plane maker Mitsubishi Heavy (

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).

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Subaru (

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) has also confirmed that it bought affected products. Subaru and Mitsubishi are major suppliers to Boeing (

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).

A Boeing spokesman has said the company was inspecting its supply chain for any substandard components. Ford (

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) and GM (

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) said Thursday they are investigating any potential impact.

The fallout will likely continue. Kobe Steel President and CEO Hiroya Kawasaki told reporters on Thursday that there may be other cases in which data has been fabricated.

The Japanese government is demanding answers.

A government spokesman told CNNMoney that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has ordered Kobe Steel "to report the result of safety checks within around two weeks, and conduct a thorough investigation of the reason for data fabrication and prevention measures within a month."

-- Chie Kobayashi and Daniel Shane contributed to this report.



CNNMoney (Hong Kong)

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Not technically related to Chinese technology though. Wrong thread?

OT. My respect for Japanese steel is still intact. It's quality is head and shoulders over those from S Korea. This incident is only a dead pixel in their obsession. That is the standard for China to aspire to.

taxiya said:

The management style and family ownership are not unique to Japan. Samsung is a good example of the "Japanese ownership" style, a family controlled success just like Toyota. Samsung is also a hybrid of banks and industrialist setup similar to Japanese companies. We can also see the up and down of HTC from Taiwan, or Wang An computer from US.

Yes the Japanese management method was highly worshipped in the west and China 10 years ago. My company being a good example. However I would not give much weight of a certain management style to the success. The fever of learning a style is more like a fashion "he is rich, his method must be good".

So far, the successful Chinese mainland companies are either State owned or collectively owned (Huawei, Xiaomi etc.), I do not have a name of family owned company, maybe Geely is one.

What I am trying to say is that regarding Japanese companies rise and fall I don't put much weight in their specific style of management and organization, not in their rise nor in their downfall. Much as what you have said, a wise son can make a decisive choice of the right path to make the business successful or ruin it as much as a group of short-sighted directors of the board in a public company. In the end, at a critical junction of the history, a "dictator" and "group of free people" can make the same mistake or right choice, only insight/foresight and intelligence can make the difference.

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And it may take thirty years or more from mistake to disaster.

siegecrossbow said:

Not technically related to Chinese technology though. Wrong thread?

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When a major company with worldwide subsidiary cheating on their technology,everybody will be affected one way or another
Kobe steel has many branches in China

Kobe Steel scandal widens, with Chinese factories involved: report

Source:Global Times Published: 2017/10/15 20:38:39
Japanese Kobe Steel admitted on Friday to falsifying inspection data on nine other products, widening the scandal at the steelmaker that had said earlier in the day it shipped wire rods for automobiles that did not meet safety requirements, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Friday.

Kobe Steel said it now estimated that it had shipped substandard or potentially substandard materials to about 500 customers, noted the Xinhua report. It had already admitted that its products, with falsified data about their strength and durability, had been sold to about 200 companies globally.

The steelmaker was disclosed to have fabricated data for its iron powder, aluminum and copper products used by companies including makers of vehicles, trains and aircraft, sectors where safety is an important issue.

As the data fabrication scandal continued, Kobe Steel said nine of its subsidiaries including those in Thailand, Malaysia and China, had engaged in improper behavior such as altering test results and failing to conduct mandatory product checks.

"We are trying to understand how this could possibly happen at so many subsidiaries, including overseas," said Kobe Steel President and CEO Hiroya Kawasaki at a news conference on Friday.

Gary Tsuchida, a spokesman for Kobe Steel, told the China-based Caijing on Friday that "its customers are doing the product checks and no quality issue has occurred at the moment."

According to the Caijing report, the Kobe Steel manufacturers in China include Suzhou Kobe Copper Technology Co, Jiangyin Sugita Fasten Spring Wire Co and Kobelco Spring Wire (Foshan) Co.

Kawasaki said Thursday that no recalls on products will be made at the moment, and the results of safety inspections on shipped products will be available within two weeks, according to the Xinhua report.

The cause of the scandal that has affected vehicle giants such as Toyota, Mazda and General Motors, would also be made known within a month, Kawasaki added.

A PR representative of Toyota China said the domestically made Toyota vehicles including those made by joint ventures with Chinese automakers FAW Group and Guangzhou Automobile Group Co had not been affected and imported ones are still undergoing checks, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday.

Mazda China and GAC Mitsubishi Motors Co gave similar statements.

However, Ford Motor China said the engine hoods of Mondeo sedans made by Changan Ford Automobile Co and sold in China, had used the aluminum products from Kobe Steel, the paper.cn reported on Friday.

The Japanese steelmaker has not confirmed whether the auto part had been affected by the aluminum issue, said Ford Motor China. It added that the engine hood does not relate to a safety issue as it is not a structural component.

Franklin said:

China develops world's first MALE Amphibious UAS

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Weight might be saved by using a tail wheel rather than a nose wheel. The advantage of the use of a nose wheel is mainly in ease of handling by humans.

You totally forget who Deng Xiaoping is. He is first and foremost a Communist, so are his successors. Thinking of him preferring capitalism (private sector dominating) is akin to thinking of Trump embracing Communism. Plain outlandish.

As of the inspiration from oversea Chinese, I believe you are talking about Deng Xiaoping's close relationship with Lee Kuan Yew. Yes Deng did take lots of advices from Lee and looked to Singapore for experience, but he and his successors also looked all over the world for lessons. You take too much credit for Lee or Singapore in China's success. You are not alone in taking credit, we have heard that kind of words from the Americans too "China owe us because we let them in WTO, we let them become rich by putting our factories in China, etc. etc."

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@taxiya I was very busy in last week. Overseas Chinese play a pivotal role in China early reform . This is not exaggeration. The Australian government wrote a 350 pages of document detailing the role of overseas Chinese. When Yeltsin was asked why the Russian prestroika failed and The Chinese reform successful He only has one word overseas chinese

Singapore is still the largest investor in China 2nd year in the row. There are 30000 Chinese government official who receive training in Singapore everything from monetary policy to city planning.

In 1985 China formally request Singapore for assistance in formulating the newly formed SEC that become the template for country wide reform.
Dr Go Kengswee was sent with his retired team of former Singapore official to assists the Chinese. It is very large team I believe 70 people They stay for the next 8 years formulating the regulation of SEZ

Singapore built 3 very large and succesfull industrial estate The Soochow industrial city, The Tianjin Environment City and the Chongqing connectivity. It is a living laboratory teaching the Chinese of modern industrial policy and city planning

The overseas Chinese literally broke the back of western embargo after the TAM without it China will fail in their quest for economic independent



China’s stupendous growth since the mid-1990s has overshadowed the diaspora, but this only obscures its key enabling role in China’s rise. ‘Diaspora’ is of course a reductionist term that elides the variation among overseas Chinese in history, outlook and circumstances — most .

But those who are have played a pivotal role in developing China’s export industries, and mediating its economic integration with the region in ways that have allowed China to grow fast while retaining key features of its pre-1979 political economy. As such, the diaspora has effectively given China a resource unavailable to any previous rising power.

From the outset of China’s economic reform era, diaspora Chinese have provided the lion’s share of inward foreign investment. This has been concentrated in export-oriented sectors, driving growth of transnational production networks that today bind China’s neighbours to it through . But this outcome was not pre-ordained. In the 1980s, China was still a capital-poor country, racked by political battles over the direction of economic reform.

During these uncertain years, diaspora investors were more persistent than their foreign competitors in China, relying on cultural and ancestral ties to offset political risk. They also directly shaped the reform debates: diaspora entrepreneurs served in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress, cultivating relationships

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.

They influenced the conception and implementation of special economic zones (SEZs). And the technology and capital they sunk into these SEZs powered the take-off of China’s export industries, weighing the political scales in favour of continued liberalisation and opening.

Diaspora investment revitalised the Chinese private sector’s flagging ‘township and village’ enterprises, and underpinned a national balance of payments that allowed importation of capital goods to upgrade the wider economy. It more than compensated for the fall-off in Western investment during the post-Tiananmen years, when China’s growth dropped to levels creating fears of a recession. Billions in international loans to China had been frozen, and US presidential candidate Bill Clinton was promising to tie annual renewal of China’s ‘most favoured nation’ (MFN) trade status to progress on human rights.

By 1994, China’s economy had turned around to become the region’s most exciting growth story. US business interests pressured then president Clinton to and renew China’s MFN status, ensuring that the US market would become an engine of China’s rise.

China’s ability to grow at double digits while retaining a huge and inefficient state-owned sector, a closed capital account and an underdeveloped financial system was made possible by building an export machine based on foreign investment. Cumulative inward FDI from 1979 to 2000 equalled a third of the GDP in the latter year — over half this money came from Hong Kong alone, and over three quarters from East Asia, mostly from diaspora Chinese.

The foreign-invested export sector played a key role in shifting China’s economic position within the region. China went from a net capital importer with wages half the ASEAN average, to an economy that today has wage levels twice the ASEAN average, and is the largest growth source of regional FDI.

The importance of inbound FDI to China has dropped over the past two decades, with the foreign share of investment . Yet nearly three quarters of this money still comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, with Taiwanese companies dominating China’s export production. As FDI into China from non-diaspora sources has grown, Hong Kong and Singapore have become intermediary hubs, leveraging their British-derived legal systems and separation from mainland Chinese jurisdiction.

As China’s economy evolves, the diaspora’s interactions with it are adapting. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei are now while continuing to shelter its economy behind capital account controls, an importance that is likely to increase given post-Brexit. Singapore’s government and private firms are substantially involved in China’s push for more sustainable and sophisticated development, for example through the and the .

Southeast Asia’s ethnic Chinese, who still

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, are significant investors in China and middlemen for other actors’ business. For instance, an

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of Indonesia’s commerce with China involves Chinese-Indonesians, despite being concentrated in sectors — infrastructure and natural resources — in which they are not major owners.

Another factor that is hard to quantify, but which some argue that China

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, is the effect on opinion towards China of the high degree of Chinese ancestry in some ASEAN countries, particularly among elites. The most prominent example is

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, but this legacy can manifest in some

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.

Today the diaspora is increasingly augmented by first-generation migrants from the PRC, and China itself is moving towards a more knowledge intensive economy with ever denser cross-border interactions. The changing nature of overseas Chinese communities and their relationship to China is a subject that deserves further exploration, not least due to the growing .

John Lee is a former Visiting Fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.