One of the most commonly asked questions is what is China doing about nanotechnologies? which is why some of the Mandarin speaking Cientifica staff were spending some time in Beijing this week at China Nano 2005. A couple of press releases from trot out a few numbers, which as regular readers already know, we will take with a large pinch of salt, or should that be a drop of soy sauce? However, one inescapable fact is that a hundred million dollars goes a lot further in China than California.
One emerging trend is that the US community seems increasingly rattled by China, whether in the field of textiles or technologies. A few veteran sinophobics have banged on about the danger of China developing nanotechnologies for a while now, much to our amusement, but a recent posting suggesting that companies should not do business with China and the subsequent discussion shows the dangers of mixing business and politics. The two are of course, often intertwined, but not here.
Nanotechnologies are already attracting attention from those scrutinising expert controls, but as much of what is being discussed is still nanoscience, we have to wonder what sort of world we would live in if messers Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg had been unable to correspond.