bansalmohit :But now with the finest educational
institutions going to countries like China we might see a major change where the next Google and Twitter are born.
Is US victim of its foreign policies?
Yes, but not the one of its government.
Forgive me for saying this, but only an American could be concerned about it in this way.
You seem to genuinely believe that if US universities don't do this then Chinese people will not advance their education beyond having multiplication tables shouted at them whilst they write the numbers in chalk on slates.
Firstly they have some really smart people, given time they can do it for themselves.
Second, every major university on the planet, plus 7City who run the CQF that Paul Wilmott and I teach is marketing hard to China, we are talking a multi-billion dollar opportunity here.
Many Chinese would prefer to go to a Beijing Berkeley than an affiliate of Edinburgh or the ETH, but they won't abandon their education because there is no Berkeley option. if there were no US universities then the others with global brands like Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, Insead, London Business School, Ecole Polytechnique will come in and take the money. They will take some of it anyway, the only option US unis have is whether they take some as well.
China is a large market for foreign goods and services and will become a huge one and a lot of business in connections between people, a lot of which is university based. Is it in US interests that newly qualified Chinese MBAs, MFEs etc have more friendships with French and British.
Will this cause China to have the next Google ?
The PRC is the 2nd largest economy on Earth with much of its growth in the area of tech manufacturing, so its going to have major universities without US help and frankly even if it tried to stop them.
Most lists of "top universities" have Britain 2nd to the USA in the number it has, indeed England makes 2nd all by itself and some colleges within Cambridge university have won more Noble prizes than France. It's universities suffer neither the corruption nor political interference that makes China 3rd rate in that game.
Coincidently I was recently approached by the UK Conservative party who currently are in government. They have a nascent program which is basically called "why doesn't Britain produce firms like google ?"
In addition to the above, Brits speak English and two of the major tech hubs (Soho and Silicon Roundabout) are within brisk walk of the largest financial centre on the planet.
But it has abjectly failed to produce a single top player in web-driven industries, and before I forget packet driven networks were a British invention,the WWW was invented by a Brit, and in any case the 1st W stands for "World", location shouldn't be an issue anyway.
The idea that China will leap past the USA on this front merely because it has some franchise US universities is frankly fanciful. Its home market is of course very large and growing so Chinese language websites will only increase, some will grow to comparable size of some large US ones.
But until China makes it to being a civilised country where someone can blog that they aren't entirely happy about government policy without their children being take away and raped by the police it will continue to have little web presence outside. Amazon carries literally tens of thousands of books that the US government wold rather didn't exist, Google finds things the government would prefer weren't found, LinkedIn is used by parties opposed to the current government, Twitter and Facebook have actually been used in real live bloody revolutions. China can have music download sites but the top level is denied to them for at least a generation.
On Monday night I had dinner with one of the founders of Salesforce.com who happens to be Canadian and has been asked to help them build new web startups. He's frank about this, it is very very hard. Initiatives exist in every developed country and mostly they are pathetically small.
This is because Silicon Valley is a unique place. What economists call network effects mean that you can get all the different things you need relatively easily and also that you are in a community that shares the buzz and shop-talk that make the difference between what you can read in books and what makes the next Twitter. Also for every Twitter, Google, etc there are N firms that tried to be them and failed. SV has a culture where being involved in such failure is not fatal for your credibility. There's other stuff, hell I wish I knew what it was because I could share it with the working party.
