Can one Tech glitch really bring the world to a standstill. The answer is yes, of course!. This happened on July 19th 2024, millions of Windows users worldwide experienced the dreaded blue screen of death paralyzing businesses grounding flights and disrupting essential Services. This is breaking news update on a global it outage crippling computer systems around the world it all stemmed from a system update performed by the tech company Crowd Strike, that left many of you woken up to this blue screen on your laptops. Which in fact has forced thousands of planes to a ground stop creating massive lines and delays at train stations, bringing banks to an abrupt halt, and stock trading to freeze, but when the world was on its knees, one country stood tall. Remarkably China, unscathed, unhurt, unhinged, it was business as usual for China and in China. This unprecedented event has left many wondering why did China's Tech self-reliance Shield it from the other nations.
Strategic decision making at the Center
The Strategic decisions and long-term planning at the Center, allowed China to weather this Digital Storm. It is imperative to understand that we are witnessing the dawn of a new era in Tech Independence. In order to understand China's resilience during this Global Tech crisis we need to look back at the country's decades long journey towards technological self-sufficiency. It all begain in 2000s, since then, China has been steadily working towards reducing its dependence on foreign technology and this push intensified in 2015 with the launch of the ambitious made in China 2025 plan.
The Initiative that Transformed China to Tech Giant
This initiative aimed to transform China from a manufacturing Powerhouse into a global leader in high-tech Industries but what exactly does this mean in practice let's break it down. This meant a massive state support.The Chinese government poured billions into research and development offering substantial funding and tax breaks to key Industries. Not only that, China increased its R&D funding by 10% signaling its commitment to technological advancement and more so focusing on critical Technologies.
High Tech priorities
When the whole world was sleeping, China prioritized development in areas like artificial intelligence Quantum Computing and most crucially semiconductors. The country recognized very early that supermacy and independency can only be achieved if one controls the heart beat of tech industry which is the chips that go in. That meant controlling the chip supply chain was essential for True Tech Independence. This was concurrently followed by talent acquisitin and talen development. China went on to heavily invest in stem education, while US was actively discrediting Stem education and watered it down to nothing more than Grade 8 numbersystem. China also actively engaged in attracting top Global Talents and with the the key focus being on human knowledge capital. Thus all of these contributed to driving creativity and Innovation subsequently contributing to technological progress and indigenous Innovation rather than simply copying foreign Technologies.
Innovation and Creativity
China has massively encouraged its companies to develop original Homegrown Solutions in every possible area and thus this has led to the rise of tech giants like Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent which offer better alternatives to Western platforms and are more customer centered. These companies gathered the much needed fulcrum and went on to strategic Acquisitions when and where necessary via strategic overseas Investments. Thus these strategies not only promoted the growth of the rapid Tech ecosystem but making it resilant to external shocks and foreign challenges.
Converting Obstacles into Opportunities
The more China's tech companies extended their arm of cooperation and support to foreign tech companies, the more barriers and obstacles they faced globally. Most of these obstacles and challenges were sugar coated under the name of security concerns. However as the saying goes, the more you block progress of an innovator, the more he grows, the same happened with these tech companies. They started to get creative and innovate.
Tech Self-Reliance
Windows, the operating system that drives 90% of all systems worldwide brokedown. The outage brought the world to its knees but China.The potential benefits of China's approach kept its flag flying high. Now the all important question is what can other countries learn from China's strategies. To understand the all important consequences of being too dependent on western companies, and when a digital disaster occurs, the whole economy comes tumbling dowmn. With all major airlines grounded flights, Banks suspended operations and stock exchanges halted trading. According to the Washington Post, which reported that while the outage was brief it caused significant economic disruptions across and a loss that is yet to be calculated.
The need of the hour: Tech self-reliance
Tech self-reliance refers to a country's ability to develop maintain and control its own technological infrastructure without excessive dependence on foreign entities the importance of this cannot be overstated Overreliance on foreign technology can leave a country vulnerable to cyber attacks Espionage or politically motivated Tech embargos economic stability as we've seen with the case of the Windows outage Tech disruptions. However if countries could develop their own Tech capabilities then they would be better positioned to innovate and compete in the global market.
Also with tech independency, countries will have data sovereignty, since there are increasing concerns about data privacy. With independent Tech infrastructure, you get to know what is coming in and what is going out.
How China stands tall
The Windows outage disruptions left major airlines in the US, UK and Europe in absolute chaos, causing widespread flight cancellations and delays. Major banks worldwide including the bank of England faced major breakdowns. This includes all of the major stock exchanges coming to a brief halt on July 19th 2024. However, when the whole world was experiencing brief paralysis that includes even hospitals, it was business as usual for all cities in China, including Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai
So the obvious question to ask here would be, how did China pull is this off
Factors contributed to China's resilience during this crisis,...
Kept Crowd Strike the company's cloud computing systems at bay. Meaning, it is better not to trust and be safe, than to trust and be sorry.
This wise move has protected mainland China from the faulty update served by Crowd Strike.
China supports and promotes domestic talents and hence subsequently domestic Alternatives were largely responsible for the ring of protection.
Many Chinese state-owned Enterprises and large private firms use domestically developed Security Solutions rather than relying on foreign providers like Crowd Strike. A decision that has proved to be wise
Continual ongoing Tech Independence efforts by China to obtain long-term strategy of reducing Reliance on foreign technology meant that many critical systems were already running on domestic software and Hardware were fool proof to the destructive updates of Crowd Strike.
Finally Decades of consistent policy and investment the made in China 2025 plan and other initiatives demonstrate the importance of having a clear long-term vision for technological development are the lessons other nations might consider learning and embark on a to developing comprehensive long-term strategies for technological advancement and self-reliance are strike a balance between self-reliance and Global integration.
User Comments
@philiptan2051
Chinaβs strategy was to make China independent of the USA and its systems and it pays off now as the whole world who are dependent on Microsoft software turned into chaos while China escaped the disastrous meltdown of the IT systems, an unprecedented global chaos. China has shown her superior IT systems, maintenance and quality control where the usa has proven its vulnerability. The pride of usa has been humbled by its failure in IT management.
@joeking1019
When the world relies on a crap system, it gets crap service from a crap company.
@Borishal
The root is government. The West's philosophy is at odds with the needs of the people. So called democracy is not what it claims to be. It rules for the benefit of the rich, and always has done. So monopolies develop which are unchallenged and unregulated.
@wongjames6430
US is testing China from the effect of blue screen scenario and now they know that China is not effected..
@viniityap2779
The writing is on the wall and China expected that long before this Tech blackout.
@andrewlin6136
Please don't learn from China π¨π³, as you'll always like to say it's your copy, your design, now follow your own design, why follow China π¨π³, coz they came from scratch, breaking all boundaries.
@Mrvictory61
Very interesting, i think the whole world can learn from China, for its long term planning and foresight, The credit goes to the Chinese Leaders, particularly President Xi Jinping. Thank you! π
@winsee4551
It is high time for all other countries to adopt China version of cloud security software instead of clouldstrike which is so easily down with just a software update issue.
@Mooi-td6pl
The July 19th blue screen brought back the memory of 1983 in college. MS-DOS system being displayed as soon as a computer was booted.
@deepone5005
What an apt name, CROWDSTRIKE.
@phillipliu2759
China say if I can't play with you ,ohhohh fine,Thank you! π Thank you! β€οΈ