Bill Gates: China Has Created a New Form Of Capitalism

 

This is an old story from 2005. It is getting harder to find on the web, and so I wanted to copy it here for future reference.

I remember vividly when this came out, because only a month or two before Mr. Gates had reportedly condemned the Opensource software movement in the west as the work of 'communists.'

Irony is like candy to the restlessly cynical mind.

Now we must keep in mind that this story was written before the suicides at the factories like Foxconn in China, that exposed the horrific working condition in those cheerless and faceless manufacturing combines where people live and work like indentured servants or serfs. And we do not know what Bill Gates was shown or told during his official visit to China.

I imagine it was also before the Chinese provoked him for the serial violation of his copyrights. Funny how regulation and good government protects property from unbridled, unprincipled greed for the same people who abhor the protections it might also provide for their workers and customers.

And he was certainly not alone in his opinion at that time. Walmart was actually requiring their key suppliers to shift manufacturing to China to break the back of US labor for their stores, and engage a spiral of lower costs for a competitive advantage.

In the technology sector there was a mass migration to the big box factories with their wonderfully 'low medical and legal overheads.'

And I question how really 'new' this 'new capitalism' might be. It sounds quite a bit like the old British East India company to me, without the gin and tonics.

The neo-liberals economists were gung ho for this, and Clinton and his administration was smoothing the way for them, even before the arrival of Bush II on the scene, who delivered the coup de grace. By the way, remember that scandal involving large campaign contributions from official Chinese sources?

As I recall a certain number of venture capital firms made quite a bit of money encouraging that trend. And that has not stopped some of them from running for President. So one might not be hard at all on Bill.

But I did not appreciate his reported remarks about Opensource which I think is a marvelously capitalist free market force for the busting up of inefficient, overpriced, and underachieving software monopolies, which are too often only challenged by other would be monopolies.

This article struck a chord in me at the time, and I wanted to preserve it, and share it with you.

China has created brand-new form of capitalism: Bill Gates

Sat Jan 29, 2005 3:49 AM ET

DAVOS, Switzerland, (AFP) - US software giant Bill Gates (news - web sites) has high praise for China, which he says has created a brand-new form of capitalism that benefits consumers more than anything has in the past.

"It is a brand-new form of capitalism, and as a consumer its the best thing that ever happened," Gates told an informal meeting late Friday at the World Economic Forum (news - web sites) in this ski resort.

He characterised the Chinese model in terms of "willingness to work hard and not having quite the same medical overhead or legal overhead".

Manufacturers have created "scale economies that are just phenomenal", in part owing to companies there and elsewhere on the planet designing good products, Gates said.

Looking ahead, he added: "You know they haven't run out of labor yet, the portion that can come out of the agriculture sector" was still considerable.

"It's not like Korea, Korea got to a point where, boom, the wages went up a lot," he said, adding "that's good, you know, they got rich and now they have to add value at a different level.

"They're closer to the United States in that sense than they are to where China is right now."

Gates continued by heaping praise on the current generation of Chinese leaders.

"They're smart," he said with emphasis.

"They have this mericratic way of picking people for these government posts where you rotate into the university and really think about state allocation of resources and the welfare of the country and then you rotate back into some bureaucratic position."

That rotation continued, Gates explained, and leaders were constantly subjected to various kinds of ratings.

"This generation of leaders is so smart, so capable, from the top down, particularly from the top down," he concluded.