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2003-12-02 - 6:54 a.m.

Hotel Galileo

Its hard to get across to non/practitioners quite how wierd this stuff is. We all fit like extras in someone else,s movie - an ambitious production it is too. The last time I was in Euroland was a course on State Aids in Maastricht where the Slovenian co/ordinator was into middle period Beatles. Tunes written before she was born.

Here we are a bunch of Euro/crazed production engineering experts, or such as can simulate the outward appearance of these animals for a day and a half trying to smell the money. Not wishing to boast, but we have cracked the UK Skills Strategy which many find baffling. I phoned my boss first thing to make sure that he was happy with the pitchhe is doing today in that neck of the woods.

But on this European scene I am pretty much a novice trying to pick up clues. I met a physicist turned metereologist turned marketeer whose father is a Scottish professor who deconstructs Shakespeare and whose sister is into some anti/globalisation venture in India. There is a rumour that she has many millions in the back pocket of her blue jeans. Others say that it can't be big money or the launch would't be on 17 December when it won't get noticed. I gave her one of the nice KK cards that Peter C put together.

The professor of medical engineering at an east midlands university introduced me to someone quite senior in a german federal ministry. She seemed quite taken with the little bizcard CDROMs that have been made as part of our new corporate identity. And I was also able to recycle a conversation I had a while ago with Karen, the sociology professor from the University of Berlin. Fingers crossed then.

There is some really interesting stuff going on machine tools and I had a word with the head of the European trade association. Like so much of the gossip here you just don't know whether it can be possibly true. That the next generation of US fighters is a year late because of an outbreak of patriotism in the Senate over the US machine-tool industry. The laugh is that it has been globalised out of existence and so they have painted themselves into a corner.

The best presentation by far was by the professor of manufacuring from Hong Kong. He has some blistering charts which look at world manufacturing output over a 300 year time-span. His prediction is that this century the balance between East and West will revert to where it was around 1720. As the per capita income of China increases new markets mushroom as certain consumer durables become affordable by hundreds of millions of people. Its like switching on an economic hurricane and it happens very fast - the world has never really seen economic forces like this before. Europe's problem is that it is currently the largest manufacturing block in the world.

It was fun when the professor from Bucharest reminded everyone that he had been educated as a Marxist. I have an old chestnut about the wisdom of the older workers and the Shanghai Machine Tool Factory from the Little Red Book. I was actually taught this stuff by a US citizen in the Science Policy Research Unit in Sussex in the early 70s..

A short google yields..............

Three Chinese companies "knowingly violated" U.S. export regulations by diverting sensitive American machine tools to a missile factory in Nanchang, according to a Commerce Department investigation completed in late 1995. .

. The companies, CATIC (China National Aero-Technology Import-Export Corporation), China National Aero-Technology and China National Supply and Marketing Corporation imported the machines under export licenses issued by the U.S. Commerce Department with the stated purpose of making civilian aircraft. The machines had been used previously to make parts for the B-1 strategic bomber. The machines were shipped to China between September 1994 and March 1995 by the McDonnell-Douglas Corporation and were destined for CATIC's Beijing Machining Center. The Machining Center, however, did not exist at the time the licenses were granted and was never created. Instead, the tools were illegally sent to other locations, including the China Nanchang Aircraft Manufacturing Company which makes military attack aircraft and Silkworm anti-ship missiles. .

Commerce Department investigators found that the three companies had committed "intentional and willful violations of U.S. export regulations" and that the diversion posed "an imminent threat to the security of the United States." The investigators recommended that the three companies and their subsidiaries and affiliates be denied U.S. export privileges until they complied with the 1994 export licenses under which the machines were shipped. } .

Funny old world then. Do not get me started on the subject of export controls and the British machine tool industry.

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