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- A sign informs travelers about Millimeter Wave Detection technology used in full body scanners at Midway Airport Dec. 15, 2010 in Chicago, Illinois. China has developed its own scanner that claims to do a better job of protecting privacy.
On a quest to boost innovation and make China a global technological power, Beijing for years has trumpeted homegrown technologies in everything from mobile communications to trains to microprocessors.
The latest project getting pumped? A locally-developed body scanner.
“Unlike those produced in the U.S., this scanner can detect prohibited objects while also guarding people’s privacy,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported late Thursday, citing an executive at the product’s manufacturer.
The scanner can automatically delete personal information when it completes its task, the report said, citing Jia Zhong, general manager of Tianjin Chongfang Science &Technology Company.
Full-body scanners deployed in airports have proven a lightning rod with certain sections of the traveling public in the U.S. since the machines can see through people’s clothes. The devices have also come under fire over concerns about radiation exposure.
The Chinese scanner has also solved the radiation issue, according to Xinhua. The X-ray radiation the device emits is “negligible,” the news agency said, equal to one-thirty-sixth of the radiation a airline passenger is exposed to when flying from Beijing to Shanghai.
The Chinese body scanner “uses an anti-scattering X-ray mechanism to detect nonmetal objects such as ceramic knives, explosives, drugs, plastic weapons and liquid bombs,” Xinhua said.
The report didn’t say whether China’s government is explicitly backing the project, but it said the body scanner has “independent intellectual property rights” and its maker plans to deploy 1,000 units each year in a variety of venues including airports, railway stations and customs crossings. Xinhua said a group made mostly of experts from Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University developed the body scanner, which was exhibited at a seminar in southern China’s Guangdong province this week.
This isn’t the first time Chinese scanners have made headlines. In 2009, Chinese censors blocked online search results and websites mentioning Namibia after anti-corruption officials in the African country began scrutinizing Nuctech Co., a Chinese company linked to the son of Chinese President Hu Jintao that had sold cargo scanners to its customs agency. Hu’s son Hu Haifeng wasn’t a suspect, but he was questioned as a witness.
The Chinese public’s relatively resigned attitude towards government monitoring may help the new body scanners avoid the public-relations disaster that accompanied the unveiling of their U.S. counterparts. There’s no guarantee, however, that new technology will experience commercial success, even with the benefit of government support.
For instance, China has extensively promoted a locally-developed standard for third-generation mobile communication, called TD-SCDMA, for use by network operators and mobile phone makers overseas.
But state-run China Mobile remains the only carrier in the world to operate a major network using it. Similarly, government-backed researchers in China have struggled for years to promote self-developed computer chips, known by the name Godson or Loongson, while a Chinese security protocol for wireless networks, called WAPI, has likewise failed to gain major traction.
Can a China-developed body scanner break the mold? Mr. Jia seems to hope so: “It has a competitive export price,” he said in the Xinhua report.
– Owen Fletcher. Follow him on Twitter @owenfletcher
Reforms started in the late 1970s with the phasing out of collectivized agriculture, and expanded to include the gradual liberalization of prices, fiscal decentralization, increased autonomy for state enterprises, the foundation of a diversified banking system, the development of stock markets, the rapid growth of the non-state sector, and the opening to foreign trade and investment.
In 2006, China announced that by 2010 it would decrease energy intensity 20% from 2005 levels.
The People’s Republic of China is the world’s second largest economy after the United States by both nominal GDP ($5 trillion in 2009) and by purchasing power parity ($8.77 trillion in 2009).
Nevertheless, key bottlenecks continue to constrain growth.
The two most important sectors of the economy have traditionally been agriculture and industry, which together employ more than 70 percent of the labor force and produce more than 60 percent of GDP.
A report by UBS in 2009 concluded that China has experienced total factor productivity growth of 4 per cent per year since 1990, one of the fastest improvements in world economic history.
Over the years, large subsidies were built into the price structure, and these subsidies grew substantially in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Globally, foreign investment decreased by almost 40 percent last year amid the financial downturn and is expected to show only marginal growth this year.
China’s ODI growth witnessed strong momentum this year.
China is expected to have 200 million cars on the road by 2020, increasing pressure on energy security and the environment, government officials said yesterday.
Although China is still a developing country with a relatively low per capita income, it has experienced tremendous economic growth since the late 1970s.
Despite initial gains in farmers’ incomes in the early 1980s, taxes and fees have increasingly made farming an unprofitable occupation, and because the state owns all land farmers have at times been easily evicted when croplands are sought by developers.
In terms of cash crops, China ranks first in cotton and tobacco and is an important producer of oilseeds, silk, tea, ramie, jute, hemp, sugarcane, and sugar beets.
Hogs and poultry are widely raised in China, furnishing important export staples, such as hog bristles and egg products.
Oil fields discovered in the 1960s and after made China a net exporter, and by the early 1990s, China was the world’s fifth-ranked oil producer.
China’s leading export minerals are tungsten, antimony, tin, magnesium, molybdenum, mercury, manganese, barite, and salt.
In addition, implementation of some reforms was stalled by fears of social dislocation and by political opposition, but by 2007 economic changes had become so great that the Communist party added legal protection for private property rights (while preserving state ownership of all land) and passed a labor law designed to improve the protection of workers’ rights (the law was passed amid a series of police raids that freed workers engaged in forced labor).
Shanghai and Guangzhou are the traditionally great textile centers, but many new mills have been built, concentrated mostly in the cotton-growing provinces of N China and along the Chang (Yangtze) River.
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