第 31 页

coming out of their universities. Poles and Hungarians are already very well connected,

very close to Europe, and their cultures are very similar [to Western Europe's]. So

today India is ahead, but it has to work very hard if it wants to keep this position.

It has to never stop inventing and reinventing itself."

The raw ambition that Rajesh and so many of his generation possess is worthy of note

by Americans-a point I will elaborate on later.

"We can't relax," said Rajesh. "I think in the case of the United States that is what

happened a bit. Please look at me: I am from India. We have been at a very different

level before in terms of technology and business. But once we saw we had an

infrastructure which made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the best

use of it. We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and today

what we are seeing is a result of that. . . There is no time to rest. That is gone.

There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are

trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray, you shake it and it will find

the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so many jobs-they

will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most

opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows

how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web

site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running. And if you are able to

demonstrate your work, using the same infrastructure, and if people are comfortable

giving work to you, and if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you

are in business."

Instead of complaining about outsourcing, said Rajesh, Americans and Western

Europeans would "be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise

yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation

over the last century. Americans whining-we have never seen that before. People like

me have learned a lot from Americans. We have learned to become a little more

aggressive in the way we market ourselves, which is something we would not have done

given our typical British background."

So what is your overall message? I asked Rajesh, before leaving with my head spinning.

191

"My message is that what's happening now is just the tip of the iceberg . . . What

is really necessary is for everybody to wake up to the fact that there is a fundamental

shift that is happening in the way people are going to do business. And everyone is

going to have to improve themselves and be able to compete. It is just going to be

one global market. Look, we just made [baseball] caps for Dhruva to give away. They

came from Sri Lanka."

Not from a factory in South Bangalore? I asked.

"Not from South Bangalore," said Rajesh, "even though Bangalore is one of the export

hubs for garments. Among the three or four caps we got quotations for, this [Sri Lankan

one] was the best in terms of quality and the right price, and we thought the finish

was great.

"This is the situation you are going to see moving forward," Rajesh concluded. "If

you are seeing all this energy coming out of Indians, it's because we have been

underdogs and we have that drive to kind of achieve and to get there . . . India is

going to be a superpower and we are going to rule."

Rule whom? I asked.

Rajesh laughed at his own choice of words. "It's not about ruling anybody. That's

the point. There is nobody to rule anymore. It's about how you can create a great

opportunity for yourself and hold on to that or keep creating new opportunities where

you can thrive. I think today that rule is about efficiency, it's about collaboration

and it is about competitiveness and it is about being a player. It is about staying

sharp and being in the game . . . The world is a football field now and you've got

to be sharp to be on the team which plays on that field. If you're not good enough,

you're going to be sitting and watching the game. That's all."

How Do You Say "Zippie" in Chinese?

As in Bangalore ten years ago, the best place to meet zippies in Beijing today is

in the line at the consular section of the U.S. embassy. In Beijing in the summer

of 2004, I discovered that the quest by Chinese

192

students for visas to study or work in America was so intense that it had spawned

dedicated Internet chat rooms, where Chinese students swapped stories about which

arguments worked best with which U.S. embassy consular officials. They even gave the

U.S. diplomats names like "Amazon Goddess," "Too Tall Baldy," and "Handsome Guy."

Just how intensely Chinese students strategize over the Internet was revealed, U.S.

embassy officials told me, when one day a rookie U.S. consular official had student

after student come before him with the same line that some chat room had suggested

would work for getting a visa: "I want to go to America to become a famous professor."

After hearing this all day, the U.S. official was suddenly surprised toget one student

who came before him and pronounced, "My mother has an artificial limb and I want to

go to America to learn how to build a better artificial limb for her." The official

was so relieved to hear a new line that he told the young man, "You know, this is

the best story I've heard all day. I really salute you. I'm going to give you a visa."

You guessed it.

The next day, a bunch of students showed up at the embassy saying they wanted a visa

to go to America to learn how to build better artificial limbs for their mothers.

Talking to these U.S. embassy officials in Beijing, who are the gatekeepers for these

visas, itquickly became apparentto me that they had mixed feelings aboutthe process.

On the one hand, they were pleased that so many Chinese wanted to come study and work

in America. On the other hand, they wanted to warn American kids: Do you realize what

is coming your way? As one U.S. embassy official in Beijing said to me, "What I see

happening [in China] is what has been going on for the last several decades in the

rest of Asia-the tech booms, the tremendous energy of the people. I saw it elsewhere,

but now it is happening here."

I was visiting Yale in the spring of 2004. As I was strolling through the central

quad, near the statue of Elihu Yale, two Chinese-speaking tours came through, with

Chinese tourists of all ages. Chinese have started to tour the world in large numbers,

and as China continues to develop toward a more open society, it is quite likely that

Chinese leisure tourists will alter the whole world-tourism industry.

But Chinese are not visiting Yale just to admire the ivy. Consider these statistics

from Yale's admissions office. The fall 1985 class had 71 graduate and undergraduate

students from China and 1 from the Soviet Union. The fall 2003 class had 297 Chinese

graduate and undergraduate students and 23 Russians. Yale's total international

student contingent went from 836 in the fall of 1985 to 1,775 in the fall of 2003.

Applications from Chinese and Russian high school students to attend Yale as

undergraduates have gone from a total of 40 Chinese for the class of 2001 to 276 for

the class of 2008, and 18 Russians for the class of 2001 to 30 for the class of 2008.

In 1999, Yiting Liu, a schoolgirl from Chengdu, China, got accepted to Harvard on

a full scholarship. Her parents then wrote a build-your-own handbook about how they

managed to prepare their daughter to get accepted to Harvard. The book, in Chinese,

titled Harvard Girl Yiting Liu, offered "scientifically proven methods" to get your

Chinese kid into Harvard. The book became a runaway best seller in China. By 2003

it had sold some 3 million copies and spawned more than a dozen copycat books about

how to get your kid into Columbia, Oxford, or Cambridge.

While many Chinese aspire to go to Harvard and Yale, they aren't just waiting around

to get into an American university. They are also trying to build their own at home.

In 2004,1 was a speaker for the 150th anniversary of Washington University in St.

Louis, a school noted for its strength in science and engineering. Mark Wrighton,

the university's thoughtful chancellor, and I were chatting before the ceremony. He

mentioned in passing that in the spring of 2001 he had been invited (along with many

other foreign and American academic leaders) to Tsinghua University in Beijing, one

of the finest in China, to participate in the celebration of its ninetieth anniversary.

He said the invitation left him scratching his head at first: Why would any university

celebrate its ninetieth anniversary-not its hundredth?

"Perhaps a Chinese tradition?" Wrighton asked himself. When he arrived at Tsinghua,

though, he learned the answer. The Chinese had brought academics from all over the

world to Tsinghua-more than ten thousand people attended the ceremony-in order to

make the declaration "that at the one hundredth anniversary Tsinghua University would

194

be among the world's premier universities," Wrighton later explained to me in an

e-mail. "The event involved all of the leaders of the Chinese government, from the

Mayor of Beijing tothe head of state. Each expressed the conviction that an investment

in the university to support its development as one of the world's great universities

within ten years would be a rewarding one. With Tsinghua University already regarded

as one of the leading universities in China, focused on science and technology, it

was evident that there is a seriousness of purpose in striving for a world leadership

position in [all the areas involved] in spawning technological innovation."

And as a result of China's drive to succeed, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates argued

to me, the "ovarian lottery" has changed-as has the whole relationship between

geography and talent. Thirty years ago, he said, if you had a choice between being

born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born an average person

in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and

living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the

world has gone flat, Gates said, and so manypeople can now plug and play from anywhere,

natural talent has started to trump geography.

"Now," he said, "I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born

in Poughkeepsie."

That's what happens when the Berlin Wall turns into the Berlin mall and 3 billion

people converge with all these new tools for collaboration. "We're going to tap into

the energy and talent of five times as many people as we did before," said Gates.

From Russia with Love

I didn't get a chance to visit Russia and interview Russian zippies for this book,

but I did the next best thing. I asked my friend Thomas R. Pickering, the former U.S.

ambassador to Moscow and now a top international relations executive with Boeing,

to explain a new development

195

I had heard about: that Boeing was using Russian engineers and scientists, who once

worked on MiGs, to help design its next generation of passenger planes.

Pickering unraveled the story for me. Beginning in 1991, Boeing started assigning

out work to Russian scientists to take advantage of their expertise in aerodynamic

problems and new aviation alloys. In 1998, Boeing decided to take this a step further

and open an aeronautical engineering design office in Moscow. Boeing located the

office in the twelve-story Moscow tower that McDonald's built with all the rubles

it made from selling Big Macs in Moscow before the end of communism- money that

McDonald's had pledged not to take out of the country.

Seven years later, said Pickering, "we now have eight hundred Russian engineers and

scientists working for us and we're going up to at least one thousand and maybe, over

time, to fifteen hundred." The way it works, he explained, is that Boeing contracts

with different Russian aircraft companies-companies that were famous in the Cold War

for making warplanes, companies with names like Ilyushin, Tupolev, and Sukhoi-and

they provide the engineers-to-order for Boeing's different projects. Using

French-made airplane design software, the Russian engineers collaborate with their

colleagues at Boeing America -in both Seattle and Wichita, Kansas-in computer-aided

airplane designs. Boeing has set up a twenty-four-hour workday. It consists of two

shifts in Moscow and one shift in America. Using fiber-optic cables, advanced

compression technologies, and aeronautical work flow software, "they just pass their

designs back and forth from Moscow to America," Pickering said. There are

videoconferencing facilities on every floor of Boeing's Moscow office, so the

engineers don't have to rely on e-mail when they have a problem to solve with their

American counterparts. They can have a face-to-face conversation.

Boeing started outsourcing airplane design workto Moscow as an experiment, a sideline;

but today, with a shortage of aeronautical engineers in America, it is a necessity.

Boeing's ability to blend these lower-cost Russian engineers with higher-cost, more

advanced American design teams is enabling Boeing to compete head-to-head with its

archrival,

Airbus Industries, which is subsidized by a consortium of European governments and

is using Russian talent as well. A U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design

hour; a Russian costs about one-third of that.

But the outsourcees are also outsourcers. The Russian engineers have outsourced

elements of their work for Boeing to Hindustan Aeronautics in Bangalore, which

specializes in digitizing airplane designs so as to make them easier to manufacture.