2		Cooperating with China for Technical Standards The Chosun Ilbo, 30p. - Opinion Jun 1, 2004 (Tue) [Economy Focus] Cooperating with China for Technical Standards Rick Wagoner, chairman and chief executive of GM said, "A company without the 'China Strategy' means that the company gave up the realization of global strategy." It means that a company should do their business toward the world and in near future, China will be in the center of the world.     Securing joint competitiveness of both countries China, which has the huge domestic market with 1.3 billion of population, is changing the economic map of the world made by the United States, European Union and Japan with 7% of economic growth each year, while advanced countries were facing economic redemption. China's IT industry is also improving rapidly with economic improvement. China is the great mobile communication country, which has the biggest mobile communication subscribers in the world. Also, China is ranked as the world's second with the second largest Internet using population and it is one of the countries that produces major IT hardware. Due to the fact that the wireless technology is being improved, united and combined, the boundary of IT industry is getting vague, and cellular phone represents this trend.  Various IT technologies are converged to the cell phone industry. For example, people can use banking services, listen to music, watch movies and even can do the medical examination with cellular phones. Therefore, global IT companies started to concentrate their investment in the cellular phone industry and related industries. Korea is the number one cellular phone manufacturing country in the world and China is showing a rapid growth in the field. Now, 'improving with China' strategy is needed rather than the  'fighting alone' strategy, for Korean companies to maintain its growth trend and secure sustainable improvement. For win-win strategy, Korea and China need to secure joint competitiveness through the standardization of major technologies. Rapid advancement of industrial digitalization and globalization made standardization competition more fiercely. The purpose of standardization war between countries, organizations and companies is to get monopolized profits by making their own technologies intellectual property. To be adopted as a technical standard, close connection of companies is needed from the first step of making standard. Especially, it is desirable for governments of the two countries, to promote industrialization of technical standard by enhancing the relationship of Korea and China that are geographically close and Korean government already started to make an effort for the promotion. For example, last March, Korea, China and Japan agreed to build the mutual assistance system related to the next generation's core IT international standard including the 3rd and 4th generation mobile phones. It shows that Korea and China is already recognizing importance of the joint standard. Related to the next generation's global standardization, Korea and China can make voices in the global IT standardization discussion, which was lead by the U.S. and Europe, if the two countries make joint strategy in the process of establishing standard.    To compete to the United States and Europe led standardization   Brisk technical transfer and exchange without borders are needed in each field of IT industry. In other words, technical transfer and exchange should be made freely between Korea and China. Currently, companies in Korea and China are lagged behind to the advanced foreign companies with regard to technical field due to overall inferior R&D resources, lack of innovative research ability, insufficiency to secure intellectual property, lack of original technology and leading ability of standardization. Korea and China should cooperate to overcome these obstacles. Korea has maintained inseparable relationship with China for a long time and the two countries have cultural similarity. Mind of the people from both countries are quite similar to each other. As living on this peninsula, Koreans have looked forward to make close relationship with only foreign countries across the Pacific Ocean. It is time to change our view that our peninsula is connected to China, and put our efforts to advance together with the country.