TechnoPolitik Weekendition #2
OpenKylin - Old wine in a new open-source bottle, China’s Quest for Innovation and Technological Advancement.
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Cyberpolitik Brief : OpenKylin - Old wine in a new open-source bottle
— Rijesh Panicker
China threw open version 1.0 of OpenKylin last Wednesday. With official figures of 900,000 users, 4,300 developers and 278 member organizations and 75 SIGs (Special Interest Groups), OpenKylin is an attempt at creating an independent open-source community with China at its core.
Kylin Linux has been in development since 2001, first as a BSD-based OS and then switching to Linux in 2011. Since 2014, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has released a Kylin version of Ubuntu. Kylinsoft, the company behind the OS, is now tasked with collaborating across industry and academia to create a community across the project.
To be clear, OpenKylin is a rebadged version of Ubuntu at present. While the project claims to have about 3100 repositories of code that have been put together independently, a quick search through the repositories shows quite a few are empty or have had minimal inputs. The special interest groups (SIG), while covering an impressive range of activities from AI frameworks to cybersecurity toolkits and hardware architecture frameworks, show minimal activity right now.
What is interesting is how China has gone about the business of creating its own domestic OS. OpenKylin has a well-designed structure and a lot of small communities with identified leaders on these projects. It is also open to all, so far. Anyone, anywhere, with a login to Gitee (the Chinese equivalent of GitHub) can access and subscribe to these communities.
As China seeks independence in high-tech areas like semiconductors, the OpenKylin community might become another tool in their arsenal, providing tested and proven software that runs on Chinese chips.
Matsyanyaaya : China’s Quest for Innovation and Technological Advancement
— Saurabh Todi
**This post provides a brief summary of a Takshashila Discussion SlideDoc authored by Pranay Kotasthane and Saurabh Todi, accessible here.
China's rapid advancement in various domains of science and technology have become a topic of significant interest. There have been several explanations that seek to explain how China has been able to compete with established players, especially the United States in bolstering its domestic innovation potential. However, some common explanations such as forced technology transfer, industrial espionage, theft or state capitalism do not entirely explain how China has been able to become one of the global innovation powerhouses.
Having looked into what enabled China to become a innovation powerhouse, especially considering its income level, we find that several foundational factors are vital to understanding its rise:
Improving basic health and education metrics, which have increased the human capital and productivity of the Chinese population.
Developing a sense of ‘creative insecurity’ due to geopolitical competition with the US, which has motivated China to invest heavily in research and development (R&D) and pursue strategic autonomy in key technologies.
Leveraging its unique political and bureaucratic structure, which allows it to implement a top-down approach to policymaking and mobilize resources and actors across different levels and sectors.
Through what has been described as "Selective Authoritarian Mobilisation and Innovation Model," China has often sought to promote research and development through this top-down approach. This ranges from direct state intervention, buying machinery from abroad, facilitating easy access to finance, promoting foreign direct investment and even industrial espionage. These policy tools have had varied levels of success.
Investigating the results of China’s top-down approach in the domains of semiconductors, bio-technology, and space, provides us with a few key insights:
China has become the world’s largest consumer and importer of semiconductors, but still lags behind in terms of design and manufacturing capabilities. It continues to face multiple bottlenecks such as dependence on foreign equipment and materials, US sanctions, and talent shortage. However, it is also pursuing various measures to overcome these challenges, such as increasing R&D spending, subsidizing domestic firms, attracting foreign investment, and developing alternative technologies.
It has emerged as a major player in biotechnology, especially in areas such as genomics, synthetic biology, and biopharmaceuticals. It has benefited from its large population and data pool, strong government support, flexible regulatory environment, and international collaborations. That said, it also faces ethical, social, and security risks associated with biotechnology, such as privacy breaches, biohacking, bioterrorism, and biosafety accidents.
China has made remarkable progress in space exploration and exploitation, such as launching satellites, rockets, probes, and astronauts. It has leveraged its civil-military integration, long-term planning, indigenous innovation, and international cooperation to achieve its space ambitions. At the same time it also faces challenges such as technological gaps, resource constraints, environmental impacts, and geopolitical tensions.
The Takshashila Discussion SlideDoc also highlights multiple recommendations for India to cope with China’s Technological Rise. Do give it a read here!
What’s on our Radar this Week?
[ Discussion Document ] Defining Dependence-induced Vulnerabilities in Asymmetrical Trade Interdependence: A Conceptual Framework, by Amit Kumar
[ Article] What if China and India became friends? (The Economist)
[ Podcast ] [Out of Consensus] Deciphering the Chinese Media Ecosystem ft. Manoj Kewalramani
[ Opinion ] Franco-Indian collaboration in Indian Ocean Region: How India-France partnership has taken centre stage in the IOR, by Bharat Sharma