Cody Taylor

Apple’s on again-off again negotiations with China’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile, have supposedly come to a standstill yet again. According to Interfax China, China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou is none too thrilled with the idea of Apple selling apps directly to China Mobile customers.

krou notes reporting in the Christian Science Monitor that the current economic crisis is helping China’s push into higher-end manufacturing by shaking out low-profit companies. The hope is that, instead of just assembling iPods, Chinese companies will be able to invent the next big thing instead. In this move China is following the well-worn path taken by Japan and the Asian tigers before it. “Last month, the National Development and Reform Commission announced revised plans to transform Guangdong and neighboring Hong Kong and Macau into a ‘significant innovation center’ by 2020. One hundred R&D labs will be set up over the next three years. By 2012, per-capita output in the region should jump 50 percent from 2007, to 80,000 yuan (,700). And by 2020, the study predicts, 30 percent of all industrial output should come from high-tech manufacturing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some of the workers being let go by IBM have a chance to remain with the company — if they’re willing to move to Brazil, India, China or a dozen other low-wage countries. But the expatriate employees would likely be paid local wages as they begin their new lives overseas.