中国争霸高科技领域 编辑本段回目录
中国的雄心壮志或许不容低估，高科技的未来属于中国吗？至少，美国专家感受到了威胁，这大概就是数字的威力吧。
北京——普普通通的会议室里，吴建平站在一面偌大的磨砂玻璃墙前。他拨动了一个开关，玻璃墙变得透明清晰起来，垂目望去，一个蔚为壮观，摆满了大型计算机显示屏的网络运行中心呈现于眼前。它们显示出中国及世界地图，精确标明了中国的下一代互联网——IPv6链路。
China already has almost twice the number of Internet users as in the United States, and Dr. Wu, a computer scientist and director of the Chinese Educational and Research Network, points out that his nation is moving more quickly than any other in the world to deploy the new protocol.
中国的互联网用户数量已近乎美国的两倍，计算机科学家、中国教育和科研计算机网专家委员会主任吴博士指出，他的祖国正在以超越世界其他任何国家的速度部署新的网络协议。
IPv6 — Internet Protocol version 6 — offers advanced security and privacy options, but more important, many more I.P. addresses, whose supply on the present Internet (IPv4) is almost exhausted.
IPv6提供了高级安全和隐私选项，而更为重要的是，它提供了多得多的IP地址，可以解决现有互联网地址（IPv4）消耗殆尽的难题。
“China must move to IPv6,” Dr. Wu said. “In the U.S., some people don’t believe it’s urgent, but we believe it’s urgent.”
“中国必须迁移到IPv6，”吴博士坦言。“美国有人认为这没那么紧要，但我们认为这迫在眉睫。”
If the future of the Internet is already in China, is the future of computing there as well?
倘若互联网的明天已然花落中国，那计算的明天是否也属于中国呢？
Many experts in the United States say it could very well be. Because of the ready availability of low-cost labor, China has already become the world’s dominant maker of computers and consumer electronics products. Now, these experts say, its booming economy and growing technological infrastructure may thrust it to the forefront of the next generation of computing.
众多美国专家声称，中国的计算前景一片大好。由于有现成的低成本劳动力，中国已经成长为全球居于统治地位的计算机和消费电子产品制造者。这些专家表示，而今中国日益繁荣的经济和迅猛发展的技术基础设施可能将其力推至下一代计算的最前列。
For China, the quest to develop advanced computing centers is not simply a matter of national pride. It is an attempt to lay the groundwork for innovative Chinese companies and to reshape the technological landscape by doing something more than assembling the world’s desktop PCs.
于中国而言，研发先进计算中心的探索之举不惟关乎民族自豪感。它亦是在努力为中国的创新类公司铺路筑基，在努力重塑技术图景，所做的并不限于装配全球的桌面PC。
Never mind that there may be no Chinese Steve Jobs, said Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Institute.
美国经济战略研究所所长克莱德·普雷斯托维茨（Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr.）称，没有中国的乔布斯并不要紧。
“There are different kinds of innovation,” he said. “We tend to equate innovation with companies that start from garages based on brainstorms.
“有各种不同的创新，”他说。“我们往往将创新等同于那些车库起家，灵感奠基的公司。”
“There is another kind of innovation that results in constant improvement that we are not good at — and they are.”
“却还有另一种创新能造成持续不断的改进，这是我们不擅长的——而他们却谙于此道。”
The view is not universal. Still, other experts say it would be a mistake to underestimate China’s capacity for rapid progress.
这一观点并未赢得共识。即便如此，其他专家还是坦承，低估中国迅速进步的能力是错误的。
“When I went to China for the first time in 1978, I saw workers stringing together computer memories with sewing needles,” said Patrick J. McGovern, the founder of the International Data Group, an early investor in Tencent Holdings, one of the most successful Chinese Internet companies. “Now innovation is accelerating, and in the future, patents on smartphones and tablets will be originated by the Chinese people.”
“1978年，我首度到访中国时，我看到工人还在用缝衣针串接计算机存储器，”帕特里克·麦高文（Patrick J. McGovern）说，他是美国国际数据集团的创始人，中国最成功的互联网企业之一——腾讯的早期投资人。“现时创新正在加速，将来，智能手机和平板电脑的专利都将为中国人所创。”
A New Kind of Challenge
全新的挑战
Going back six decades — to Eniac, considered to be the first electronic computer — the United States has set both the pace and the path of modern computing and communication. From mainframes to iPhones, from the Arpanet to WiFi, innovation has been as American as Norman Rockwell.
时光倒转60年，第一台电子计算机Eniac问世，美国从此确定了现代计算和通信的发展步伐和路径。从大型机到iPhone，从Arpanet到WiFi，创新始终如诺曼·洛克威尔（Norman Rockwell）一般浸透美国人的心灵。
And for more than a generation, the hub of innovation has been Silicon Valley, a multicultural melting pot that has supported the singular amalgam of computer-hacker ethos and entrepreneurial aggressiveness that made it the envy of the world.
作为创新中心，硅谷的辉煌不止延续了一代，这座多文化的熔炉，一直滋养着计算机-黑客思潮和企业家进取精神的奇妙融合，成为了全球独领风骚之地。
Probably the most serious challenge to the Valley’s dominance came in the late 1980s from Japan, which seemed on the brink of taking command of the semiconductor and computer industries until its economy foundered.
对硅谷统治力最严峻的挑战，也许来自于1980年代末的日本，在它经济触礁之前，眼看就要控制半导体和计算机产业了。
Today, China poses a very different kind of challenge. While Japan’s economy has long been driven by exports, China will soon have the world’s largest domestic market for both Internet commerce and computing.
今天，中国摆出的是一副全然不同的挑战姿态。日本经济历来都靠出口驱动，而中国即将拥有全球最大的电子商务和互联网计算的国内市场。
The world took notice of Chinese technological prowess in late 2010, when a Chinese supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, briefly became the world’s fastest. Though it was made from American processors and was soon surpassed by a Japanese machine, it was still indisputable evidence that the Chinese had achieved world-class computing designs.
2010年末，中国的技术威力令世界为之侧目，当时中国的超级计算机天河-1A一度成为全球最快的计算机。尽管它用的是美国的处理器，且很快就被日本的一台计算机超越，但它仍然无可辩驳地证明，中国已经具备了世界级的计算设计能力。
Then, this October, another Chinese supercomputer, the Sunway Bluelight MPP, broke the petaflop barrier — a quadrillion calculations per second — putting it among the world’s 20 fastest computers.
此后，今年10月，另一台中国超级计算机神威蓝光MPP突破了每秒浮点运算的障碍，达到了每秒运算1千万亿次，从而跻身全球20台最快计算机之列。
This machine proved even more surprising in the West. Not only was it based on a Chinese-made microprocessor, but it also achieved a significant advance in low-power operation. That might indicate the Chinese now have a significant lead in “performance per watt” — a measure of energy-efficient computing that will prove crucial to reaching the next generation of so-called exascale supercomputers, which are computers that will be a thousand times faster than the world’s fastest today, and which are scheduled to arrive by the end of this decade.
这台机器甚至令西方更感惊讶。它不但是基于中国制造的微处理器，而且它在低功耗运行方面有了显著的改善。这或许标志着中国如今在“每瓦性能”上领先一步。（“每瓦性能”是高能效计算的一个量度，势将对制造下一代所谓的Exasclae超级计算机起到至关重要的作用，此类计算机将比今天世界最快的计算机再快一千倍，预计将在这个十年末问世。）
“This is what Chinese companies need to do,” said Hu Weiwu, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is the chief designer of another Chinese family of microprocessor chips. “We can send a spaceship to space. We can design high-performance computers.”
“这正是中国公司需要做的，”中国科学院教授胡伟武说道，他是另一类中国造微处理器芯片（译注：即“龙芯”）的总设计师。“我们能向太空发射飞船，我们也能设计高性能计算机。”
American officials agree, saying the Chinese government’s investment in supercomputing is paying off.
美国官员表示同意，说中国政府在超级计算机上的投入正在收到回报。
“The overall point of all of this is that the Chinese understand the importance of high-performance computing,” said Donna Crawford, the associate director of computation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “They are executing on the plan as a key enabler for their whole society.”
“通盘审视这些不难得知，中国明白高性能计算的重要性，”美国劳伦斯-利弗莫尔国家实验室计算副主任唐娜·克劳福德（Donna Crawford）说。“他们正在实施的这项计划，堪称他们整个社会的关键性推进器。”
Obstacles to Dominance
取得主导地位的障碍
Last year, in an interview that would have been seen as extraordinary if the remarks had been made by a United States president, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao committed China to creating an “Internet of things.”
去年，在一次采访中，温家宝总理承认中国正在创建“物联网”，如果这样的话是打美国总统的口里出来，那可真叫人倍感意外了。
Connecting homes and smart power grids has been a driving principle behind the next-generation Internet in the United States. And it goes hand in hand with “ubiquitous computing,” the idea that computing power transforms everyday devices like smartphones and digital music players.
连接家庭与智能电网一直是驱动美国下一代互联网的基础原理之一。它与“普适计算”是并行的概念，就是用计算能力变革诸如智能手机和数码音乐播放器之类的日常设备。
But China’s efforts at dominance are hardly without obstacles. The country has fallen far short on a decade-long commitment to build the world’s leading semiconductor industry, and it still imports a vast majority of microchips for the products it assembles. Its best chip factories are two to three generations behind world leaders like Intel, in the United States, and T.S.M.C., in Taiwan.
但中国夺取主导地位的努力很难一蹴而就。在创建全球领先的半导体工业上，该国起步少说晚了十年，至今所装配产品的微处理器还是大多数依赖进口。其最好的芯片工厂也比全球居于领先地位的制造厂商，如美国的英特尔和台湾的台积电落后两到三代。
China’s great weakness may prove to be too much government control. Chinese innovation may also be limited by the relative lack of intellectual property protection, discouraging entrepreneurs from breaking new ground.
或许中国主要的弱点在于政府管得太多。中国的创新也可能因相对不足的知识产权保护而受限，这会打击企业家开拓新市场的积极性。
The 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, in Beijing in September, left American technology experts underwhelmed.
9月于北京召开的第十三届普适计算国际大会，未能给美国的技术专家留下什么深刻印象。
“There was nothing that really leaped out at me,” said John Seeley Brown, who directed the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1980s, when the concept was invented.
“在我看来，没什么真正让我感到眼前一亮的，”约翰·希利·布朗（John Seeley Brown）坦言，1980年代，普适计算的概念诞生之际，他曾是施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心的负责人。
In contrast, he said, he observed true innovation at companies like Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing firm with extensive operations in mainland China that has done much of Apple’s assembly work.
他说，倒是他在像富士康这样的公司观察到了真正的创新，这家台湾的制造企业在中国大陆拥有广泛的业务，一直负责大多数苹果产品的装配工作。
“There is the deep embedding of the research and design culture driving a place like Foxconn to do things that they would never have done on their own,” he said. “We’ve now combined the best thinkers in the U.S. sitting side by side with the people who are best at manufacturing in the world.”
“研究与设计文化的深植，正驱使着像富士康这样的公司去实现那些它们从来无法独立完成的事情，”他说。“我们如今已将美国最优秀的思想家与全球最擅长制造者共聚一席。”
Still, other investors have glimpsed similar possibilities in China itself. Ruby Lu, a Beijing-based partner in DCM, a venture capital firm with investments in China, described a semiconductor firm begun with lead designers in San Diego and support engineers in Shanghai, working at one-sixth the cost.
不过，其他一些投资者也在中国隐约感觉到了相似的机遇。卢蓉（Ruby Lu）是在中国投资的风投企业DCM驻北京的董事合伙人，她谈及了一家新成立的半导体企业，这家企业的主要设计师在圣迭戈，而支持工程师在上海，其人力成本只有六分之一。
“It was the Shanghai team who came up with a groundbreaking solution to an existing problem,” she recalled in an e-mail. What scares competitors is that China has begun producing waves of amazing hardware engineers and software programmers, winning international competitions and beginning to dominate the best engineering programs in the United States. The University of California, Berkeley, is about to announce a deal to create an engineering campus in Shanghai, raising fears about transferring technology from one of the best American engineering schools.
“有一个现存问题，是上海的团队提出了创新的解决方案，”她在电子邮件里回忆道。令对手恐惧的是，中国已经开始产出大批技惊四座的硬件工程师和软件程序员，他们在国际竞争中脱颖而出，开始控制美国最好的工程科目。加州大学伯克利分校，准备宣布在上海创立一所工程学院，从而引发了对美国最好的工学院之一向中国转输技术的担忧。
Much has been made of computer science “returnees,” most notably Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, who left Princeton to create an institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing that has already made breakthroughs in game theory and computer security.
许多转输技术的工作已由计算机科学的“归国人员”完成，其中尤为惹人注目的是姚期智，他告别普林斯顿大学，在北京清华大学创办了一家研究所，已经在博弈论和计算机安全方面取得突破。
“Overnight there is lots of activity coming from Beijing,” said Christos Papadimitriou, a computer scientist at Berkeley.
“一夜之间，北京就涌现了许多活动，”伯克利分校的计算机科学家克里斯托斯·帕帕蒂米特里奥（Christos Papadimitriou）如是说。
And there is little question that the structure of Chinese industry is becoming more innovation-oriented. This summer Dieter Ernst, senior fellow at the East-West Center, testified before a Congressional commission that the Chinese had overtaken South Korea and Europe in total patents and were catching up with the United States and Japan.
毋庸置疑，中国的工业结构正越来越以创新为导向。今夏，美国东西方研究中心高级研究员迪特尔·恩斯特（Dieter Ernst）当着一个国会委员会的面证实，在专利总量上，中国已经赶超韩国和欧洲，正在追赶美国和日本。
Moreover, China is now the world’s second-largest venture capital market, growing to $7.6 billion from just $2.2 billion in 2005, while the American venture capital market has remained largely stagnant, according to Rebecca A. Fannin, author of the new book “Startup Asia” (Wiley).
此外，瑞贝卡·法宁（Rebecca A. Fannin）在她的新书《新兴亚洲》（Wiley）里透露，中国现在还是全球第二大风投市场，风险资本从2005年的仅22亿美元增长到了76亿美元，而美国风投市场却普遍停滞不前。
Researchers at the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship recently mapped the investment activity of 769 firms investing in 2,203 Chinese companies and found patterns reminiscent of Silicon Valley.
最近，针对向中国2203家公司投资的769家企业，斯坦福大学区域创新暨创业项目的研究人员就它们的投资活动进行了梳理，所发现的模式让人不禁联想到硅谷。
“You have lead individuals and firms that have established beachheads of success and power,” said Marguerite Gong Hancock, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who directed the study. “They are the same firms that were successful in Silicon Valley that have transplanted their expertise to China.”
“你们有领头的个人和企业，在成就和能力上已然占得先机，”玛格丽特·龚·汉科克（Marguerite Gong Hancock）说，她是斯坦福商学院的教授，也是此项研究的负责人。“它们就是那些在硅谷已获成功的企业，这些公司已将他们的专业技术移植到了中国。”
The similarities to Silicon Valley can be eerie. “All the symptoms of a bubble are here,” said Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-director of J Capital Research, a technology investment research firm in Beijing. “It’s an unsettling instability.”
其与硅谷的相似度堪称诡异。“泡沫的全部征兆这儿都有，”北京一家技术投资研究公司美奇金的研究部主任杨思安（Anne Stevenson-Yang）说。“这种不稳定状况令人不安。”
At the same time, there is a consensus that China’s entrepreneurs have a workaholic culture that is unmatched anywhere in the world.
与此同时，有共识认为，中国企业的工作狂文化是世界其他任何地方都难以匹敌的。
“What I found in doing five startups in China is the culture makes Silicon Valley look laid-back and slow,” said Tom Melcher, an entrepreneur who left California a decade ago to move to Beijing. “In Beijing, if you want to find a chief executive at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday, it’s guaranteed you will find him at the office.”
“我在中国做过五家新创企业，就发现与这里的文化相比，硅谷显得悠哉游哉多了，”十年前即离开加州搬到北京的企业家麦彻同（Tom Melcher）如是说。“在北京，如果你想周五晚上7点半找某位总裁，那你笃定能在办公室里找到他。”
Not every China specialist buys such comparisons.
研究中国的专家并非人人都相信这样的比较。
“When we look at China through the lens of American decline, we see the Chinese ascendancy, we see the modern skylines and the fastest computers and the new airports, and we see an invincible force building,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “Through Chinese eyes it looks tremendously uncertain and provisional. They are not filled with self-confidence.”
“当我们透过下滑美国的角度打量中国时，我们看到了中国的影响力，看到了现代的天际线，看到了最快的计算机和崭新的机场，我们还看到了一幢势不可摧的大厦，”亚洲协会美中关系中心主任夏伟（Orville Schell）说。“而透过中国人的眼睛，它看上去极不确定、转瞬即逝。他们并没有满怀信心。”
But Mr. McGovern, the investor and venture capitalist, thinks that may be an advantage. In the United States, he says, he is often approached by overconfident entrepreneurs who walk off in a huff when he is less than impressed by their ideas.
可身为投资者和风险资本家的麦高文先生，却认为这也许是一项优势。他说，在美国，他经常接触到太过自信的企业家，一旦他不为他们的构想所动，他们就会怫然而去。
The Chinese entrepreneurs he deals with are different.
而他遇到的中国企业家不是这样。
“They will come to me and show me their language-translation software that will convert Mandarin to English and back again,” he said. “Then I will tell them that I don’t think there is a market because it is too difficult to protect the intellectual property.”
“他们过来找我，给我演示他们的翻译软件，可将中文转为英文，还可从英文再转回中文，”他说。“然后，我跟他们说，我认为这没有市场，因为要保护这样的知识产权实在太难。”
Rather than send them away, however, he might ask them if they would be interested in working on a different idea that his firm has been considering.
不过，他并未就此打发了他们，他试探着问他们，是否有兴趣实施他公司正在考虑的其他构想。
“They will respond, ‘Can I get rich?’ When I tell them that I think that there is a good chance, they say, ‘O.K., I’ll do it!’ ”
“他们会回应道，‘我能赚钱吗？’当我告诉他们这是个良机时，他们会说，‘好的，我来做！’”
