U.S. research making great leap

PUDONG, China - U.S. factory workers were the first to lose jobs to low-cost Chinese labor.

Could research and technical employees be next?

U.S. companies say they won't be. But they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars building and staffing research centers like ones 30 minutes east of Shanghai's Huangpu River....

Experts describe the Chinese research-building boom as "awesome" and "mushrooming." They say the lure of China is irresistible, with its 1.3 billion people and 10 percent economic growth. Costs are low. Research employees earn one-fifth what they would in the United States. Manufacturing workers earn $150 a month.

"Some companies are afraid not to be in China because their competitors are there," said Marshall Meyer, a professor at the Wharton School. In some ways, it does not matter if they all lose money in China. "They will all lose or win together. So their relative standing in the [global] industry doesn't change."

But companies should be careful, warned Andrew C. Mertha, assistant professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis and author of The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China.

"If you've got a technology that is like three generations old, that might go to China," Mertha said. "Any company that takes its crown jewels to China, its most innovative technology, is asking to get them stolen." ...

•	U.S. research making great leap Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, Nov. 5, 2006 Byline: Bob Fernandez, Inquirer Staff Writer