Not sure how it works in the US, but in other places I am familiar with where professionals are licenced by a professional body, those professional bodies work under a charter which is government legislation. So in a very real sense those professionals are licenced by the government. The professional body has the contract to implement the licensing regime.

unlocked UMTS iPhones have been available in China for at least 18 months to 2 years. They run on the China Unicom UMTS network at 3G, or you can run them on the China Mobile network at 2.5G. The discussion is whether the iPhone should run TD-SCDMA or perhaps LTE, the first of which China Mobile supports as its 3G standard now, the second being what they are going to. As to the content of iPhones, they are assembled in China by HonHai (FoxConn), which has 1M employees all over China but the supply chain is from all over the world. Even with the Chinese labour component, the Chinese content is not the biggest component. (I can't remember whether it was Japan or Korea).

I'd agree up to a point with some of this. However, I'd have to take issue with "Everything about amplification and electronic theory was known and done as of about thirty years ago." I did electronic engineering just less than 30 years ago and 100% of what I was taught about high-power semiconductors has been obsoleted, and most of the stuff that obsoleted it is now obsolete. So, while the analogue theory may not have changed all that much, what can be achieved has been revolutionised about twice. If you look at commercial systems that get used in venues, studios, etc. then it has been furter revolutionized by DSP, active speaker technologies, computer control, adaption to environmental factors, etc. And when I was studying electronics, the 70s seemed like the stone age because they had almost no FETs and SCR stood for saturable-core reactor. When I studied amplifier theory, Class A and Class B amplifiers were reality and Class D was a new development just coming in and certainly not suitable for audio. These days I think you'd be amazed at the quality that comes out of 6" drivers. I sure am. I used to own "your father's system" and it had 12" woofers, only because I couldn't afford 15". These days I have a pair of speakers that has 6" drivers and they are pretty flat down to abut 35Hz - about what you got out of 15" drivers in the 70s. They sound great (much better than my father's speakers) and don't need a sub for any music. (But the sub is great for movies.) I tend to agree with the article that what people care about has changed. Sound systems are used to watch movies and listen to ipods. So naturally you want 6, maybe 10 channels rather than 2. That is a lot more amplifier. And the source material has degraded, at least for the average person who is prepared to shell out a 1980 $500 for a receiver. How many people on this list actually sit down on a regular basis and listen to an album right through? I know I do it rarely (although I am trying to change that) these days, but 15 years ago I did it regularly.

Wintermute has a point. I would say an approach like "I don't care what everyone else does. We are an American Company and have to be careful to obey the laws of both China and America here" might work better. Your counterpart will be well aware that software piracy is illegal in both China and the US. S/he will also be aware that "everyone does it" is not strictly true, even in Beijing. Well-run operations don't need to pirate software these days, because these days legitimate software is easier to get and the Chinese version is also usually very inexpensive here, taking away the reasons why piracy was almost universal even 5-7 years ago. What you might look at is how hard is it for the local office to actually procure legitimate software? Do you have stupid head-office accounting rules that make it impossible for staff to buy software from a local shop at the local price and then expense it?