After having spent yesterday happily slandering China, I wish I could simply extrapolate that argument to their high tech industry. Unfortunately, that doesn?t work.

China today is an economic juggernaut. Unless India invests heavily in infrastructure, very soon they would be playing catch up with Indian services sector including the software industry. And the march that they are stealing on services has nothing to do with cheap labor. The top universities in China are producing first rate engineers pretty much on an assembly line. When you combine that with Chinese work ethic and infrastructural superiority, the only thing that is holding them back is their trouble with the English language. And That is not exactly an insurmountable barrier.

Peter Mcdermott, traveller and programmer, maintains an interesting weblog from Beijing where he works in the IT sector. It gives you a good flavour of the techy life out there.

There is a good story in BusinessWeek about why Indian software companies feel comfortable that they won?t be challenged by China soon. I think it is foolish.

I am too burnt out at the end of the day to write another treatise about China. We'll keep that for the time the Chinese premier makes the return visit to India!