China's phone manufacturer is changing the United States, the CNN reported.

Xiaomi is the most important phone manufacturer you've never heard of, wrote Clay Shirky, an author and associate professor of journalism at New York University.

China and the United States are the two most important economic powers in the world, and that goes double for technology.

For three decades, that relationship could be summed up as "invented here, produced there." Xiaomi is one indicator among many that that relationship is over. Its phones are well-designed and cheap, and, more importantly, the firm has been engineered to rely on the Internet, allowing it to build one of the leanest manufacturing and sales operations the world has ever seen.

Xiaomi marks the end of China as a pure importer of products designed elsewhere. It was one of the first companies to adopt the new methods that are making China a center of innovation in design, electronic commerce and services. Xiaomi introduces a new risk in that relationship -- not a risk that Chinese firms will copy too much from the United States, but that the American firms will copy too little from China, he said.

(Xinhua)