Here's an article to send around to the management team that just may get them to invest in your department and in research and development. Today's Financial Times profiles how Chinese scientists are making massive leaps in terms of invention and the all important knowledge economy.
The dragon's lab - how China is rising through the innovation ranks details how in 2006 China overtook Japan in research spending rankings and is now in second place and closing in on a weakening USA. China also overtook engineering experts the Germans last year in terms of the number of patents filed and is now in the top five.
Not only is R&D getting lots of Chinese funding, so is education to produce the researchers with the number of university students quadrupling to 16m, 352,000 of which are engineers, compared to just 137,000 in the USA.
Multi-national companies are keen to exploit this interest as well because Chinese scientists earn just 20% of what a western scientist takes home.
There are problems though, corruption such as the recent case of a dean at Jiatong University claiming to have developed a microchip that can process 200m instructions per second had in-fact scraped the name off a Motorola processor and the report highlight a number of studies and experts that show China is not an innovative country.
Don't get too carried away by China's R&D. They have tried to play down the hype following the recent OECD report about their meteoric rise.
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Western companies who are rushing in with their wallets bulging will soon find that those ultra-cheap researchers are in great demand and are hard to retain. Wage inflation is in high double figures.