Reading the FT today I discover that a Chinese company called Lenova has brought IBM personal computers. Comment can be found at zdnet , and there’s some background material produced by the China Study Group .

(I like the strap line ‘looks best in Firefox’ - how many government sites can say that?).

Why does any of this matter? Well, for one the global economic engines are moving. Russia and China are talking seriously about oil deals (China is already trading with Iran which the Bush regime has hinted that it might attack).

Another reason is the size and scale of the Chinese economy and the domestic market (estimate market for mobile phones for example is about 800 million - and that doesn’t account for all the ones left on trains). This means China can set standards and force other manufacturers to meet them, not vice versa.

And what does it matter to e-government and e-democracy? Well, while there’s certainly plenty of government in China, there sure ain’t much democracy. But for how much longer?

The speed of capitalist expansion in China has been quite staggering, but the iron grip of a dictatorship remains. This to me has a parallel with the Russian economy in the run up to the 1905 revolution. Russia at the time had a rapidly expanding economy, and one which the most modern and advanced technical and industrial techniques were being used. But this occured in conditions of political autocracy and there was a huge uneveness between the advanced industrial units and the backwardness of Russian agriculture. The result? A spectacular upheavel in 1905 graphically described in Trotsky’s book ‘1905′.

Only the size and the scale of everything in China is bigger, the contradictions sharper, its role in the world market more advanced (and becoming more so).

And for a local government angle, the Bejing Municipal Council in 2001 rejected Microsoft (even though you can buy illegal copies for as little as a dollar a CD) for the very own Chinese homegrown Red Flag Linux