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作者 美国报纸新闻:《纽越时报》文章The Chinese Century   
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头衔: 海归元勋
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文章标题: 美国报纸新闻:《纽越时报》文章The Chinese Century (3954 reads)      时间: 2004-7-05 周一, 16:57   

作者:安普若海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com

The Chinese Century

July 4, 2004

By TED C. FISHMAN


China used to be far away, the country at the bottom of the
world. Certainly that must be how it seemed just 20 years
ago in a place like Pekin, Ill., a city of 34,000 residents
on the Illinois River that took its name from the Chinese
capital in the 1820's. According to local legend, Pekin is
directly opposite Beijing on the globe. The high-school
teams there were still called the Chinks until 1981, when
they were renamed the Dragons. A smart and forward-looking
decision, it turns out: as is happening throughout the
United States, the Pekinese have in their own local ways
grown inextricably linked to the Chinese of today. They are
now connected not by an imaginary hole through the earth
but by the world's shipping lanes, financial markets,
telecommunications networks and, above all, the
globalization of appetites.

Follow the corn, for example. Trade deals struck between
the U.S. and China in April will, farmers around Pekin
hope, lead China to lower its import barriers and buy half
a million metric tons of American corn this year. Illinois
corn farmers get higher-than-usual prices for their exports
because they have ready access to river transportation and
in turn to big ports. Pekin is also home to the plant of
Aventine Renewable Energy, the nation's second-largest
producer of ethanol, a fuel derived from corn. (Ten percent
of the American corn crop is converted to fuel.) China
recently passed Japan as the world's second-largest
consumer of petroleum, and growing Chinese demand has
lately been pushing up oil prices worldwide. That makes
ethanol an increasingly attractive alternative. And,
indeed, ethanol prices climbed 40 cents a gallon this
spring, dragging up U.S. corn prices as a result, a boon to
Pekin's farmers and industry.

Then there's Excel Foundry and Machine, a local factory
that makes parts for machinery used in heavy construction
and mining operations. Doug Parsons, the current head of
this family-owned business, has already relocated 12
percent of the company's production to China in order to
hold onto business that would otherwise be lost to China's
huge, cheap foundries; during the next decade he may well
have to move much more of his production offshore. Parsons
has China on his mind for other reasons too: over the past
few months, the prices of copper and iron, like those of
oil, have skyrocketed in response to Chinese demand,
driving up Excel's costs as a result. At the same time,
however, his international mining customers have been
buying more Excel products in order to feed that same
Chinese appetite for commodities. And Parsons himself
recently started a new company that he says will build and
service advanced rock-crushing machines -- in part to take
advantage of the frenzied construction boom under way in
China. (One measure of just how big this boom is: China
currently has more than 15,000 highway projects in the
works, which will add 162,000 kilometers of road to the
country, enough to circle the planet at the equator four
times.)

Even something as all-American as Pekin's new Wal-Mart
Supercenter spreads China's influence around town. Because
12 percent of China's exports to the U.S. end up on
Wal-Mart's shelves, and because Wal-Mart's trade with China
accounts for 1 percent of that country's gross domestic
product, the company exerts tremendous downward pressure on
prices. Its buying power enables it to dictate, in effect,
what a Chinese manufacturer will get for producing goods
that American consumers want. By selling Chinese-made
portable DVD players with seven-inch L.C.D. screens for
less than $200, for instance, Wal-Mart helped to cut the
price of these trendy devices in half over the last year.
Competitors have to match the chain's prices or go under.
Nearly every shopper in Pekin will therefore save money by
shopping at Wal-Mart -- which is to say he or she will
profit from the retailer's China connection. Of course,
this very connection may also contribute to Wal-Mart's
ability to drive other Pekin-area stores out of business.

In short, Pekin, Ill., is not so different from lots of
American places. China is everywhere these days,
influencing our lives as consumers, providers, citizens. It
has by far the world's most rapidly changing large economy,
and our reactions to it shift just as quickly. China is at
one moment our greatest threat, the next our friend. It
siphons off American jobs; it is essential to our
competitive edge. China is the world's factory floor, and
it is the world's greatest market opportunity. China's
industrial might steals opportunities from the developing
world, even as its booming economy pulls poorer countries
up (lately it has been getting credit for helping Japan out
of its slump too). China exports deflation; it stokes
soaring prices. China will boom; it will bust. Or perhaps
the country's economy is feeling its way right now to the
soft landing that will prevent another Asian economic
crash, and all the recent record numbers on trade,
industrial output, consumer spending and debt are simply
now in scale with China's size. The truth about China is
that, like all big countries, it is full of real
contradictions.

Another truth is that the current feelings about China do
not fully reflect today's reality. The U.S. economy is
about eight times the size of China's. Our manufacturing
sector is bigger than the entire Chinese economy.
Americans, per capita, earn 36 times what the Chinese do.
And there is no shortage of potential roadblocks in China's
path, either. Its banks may collapse. Its poor and its
minorities may rebel. Uppity Taiwan and lunatic North Korea
may push China to war. The U.S. could slap taxes on
everything China ships to us.

Still, barring Mao's resurrection or nuclear cataclysm,
nothing is likely to keep China down for long. Since 1978,
its gross domestic product has risen fourfold; in straight
dollar terms, China's economy is the world's sixth-largest,
with a G.D.P. of around $1.4 trillion. It has gone from
being virtually absent in international trade to the
world's third-most-active trading nation, behind the U.S.
and Germany and ahead of Japan. Tom Saler, a financial
journalist, has pointed out that 21 recessions, a
depression, two stock-market crashes and two world wars
were not able to stop the U.S. economy's growth, over the
last century, from $18 billion ($367 billion in 2000
dollars) to $10 trillion. In constant dollars, that is a
27-fold increase.

China is poised for similar growth in this century. Even if
China's people do not, on average, have the wealth
Americans do, and even if the United States continues to
play a strong economic game and to lead in technology,
China will still be an ever more formidable competitor. If
any country is going to supplant the U.S. in the world
marketplace, China is it.

Mao as Proto-Capitalist

Mornings at Wanfeng automotive factory outside Shanghai
begin with a neat line of employees doing calisthenics to
martial music broadcast over a P.A. system. The
blue-uniformed workers, nearly all of them young men, make
for a clean-cut, well-pressed company line. The Japanese
introduced courtyard exercises and company songs to the
world back in the 70's, when that nation appeared to have
the world's best industrial jobs. Today, Japan is just
stumbling out of a long malaise, and its dwindling pool of
young laborers seem to lack the compulsion to work like
hell.

But the striving Japan of old still sets a good example for
would-be worldbeaters, as Wanfeng's management knows --
only the Chinese manufacturer goes one better. Its
employees regularly have their spirits revved at company
boot camps run by People's Liberation Army drillmasters who
inculcate the twin virtues of patriotism and hard work. The
results are impressive. Ten years ago, Wanfeng was
hammering out motorcycle wheels by hand in a Chinese
garage; a few years later it was the No. l seller of
aluminum-alloy motorcycle wheels, first in China and now in
Asia. The company soon became a top national and global
seller in alloy automobile wheels too.

Wanfeng may have received some breaks on the way up: the
company-produced video that describes its rapid ascent does
not identify the early contracts that enabled Wanfeng to
grow so fast, nor whether Wanfeng had insider connections
to state-run companies in the motorcycle and car
businesses. There is nothing in the company literature
about how the private company secured its financing,
either. Nonetheless, Wanfeng today is still scrappy,
aggressive and capable. It now turns out about 60,000
vehicles a year that, if you squint just a little, appear
to be remarkably like Jeep Grand Cherokees. They look
great, come with every modern luxury, including leather
seats and DVD video systems, and purr when driven.

Yet Wanfeng's factory itself is a bare-bones machine. Most
tellingly -- this goes a long way toward accounting for
China's current status as an economic juggernaut -- there
is not a single robot in sight. Instead, there are hundreds
of young men, newly arrived from China's expanding
technical schools, manning the assembly lines with little
more than large electric drills, wrenches and rubber
mallets. Engines and body panels that would, in a Western,
Korean or Japanese factory, move from station to station on
automatic conveyors are hauled by hand and hand truck here.
This is why Wanfeng can sell its hand-made luxury versions
of the Jeep (to buyers in the Middle East, mostly) for
$8,000 to $10,000. The company isn't spending money on
multimillion-dollar machines to build cars; it's using
highly skilled workers who cost at most a few hundred
dollars a month -- whose yearly pay, in other words, is
less than the monthly pay of new hires in Detroit. Factory
wages in the country's booming east coast cities can be
$120 to $160 a month and half that inland, according to
Merrill Weingrod of China Strategies, an affiliate of Kurt
Salmon Associates, a consulting firm.

Wanfeng is hardly the first to mobilize Chinese labor as a
stand-in for machinery. Mao Zedong believed that China
could leapfrog other developing countries by employing an
effectively unlimited supply of human labor. Chinese
peasants and urban laborers would take the place of the
expensive machines that the Western industrial powers had
spent 100 years developing; China's wealth, Mao reasoned,
lay in its abundant population.

He was right, though China failed disastrously to execute
his Great Leap Forward in the late 50's. Most famously, Mao
exhorted the Chinese to build backyard furnaces to melt
down their iron implements, all in service of his goal to
have China outproduce Great Britain in steel and to surpass
the British economy in size in 15 years. Instead, the
people were left without the few tools, pots and pans they
had started with. And they starved: the Great Leap Forward
was the direct cause of the famine that killed 30 million
people, among the deadliest man-made disasters in history.

But even as the Communists pauperized the nation and
continued to exercise complete control over the deployment
of labor -- determining, for example, who would be moved
out of the countryside and into the cities -- they also
primed China for the capitalist successes to come.
Prasenjit Duara, a professor of Chinese history at the
University of Chicago, acknowledges the paradox: ''The
Communists made the work force docile and organized labor
to be a managed entity that could be continuously
mobilized,'' he says. ''A Marxist might see China under Mao
as producing the conditions of capitalism.'' (Duara adds
that the institutions created by the Communists to provide
housing, education and medical care later saved capitalists
the price of developing the work force.) An obedient labor
force keeps management costs down too. Despite the enormous
numbers of workers in Chinese factories, the ranks of
managers who supervise them are remarkably thin by Western
standards. Depending on the work, you might see 15 managers
for 5,000 workers, an indication of how incredibly well
self-managed they are.

''There is a reason why the world is so impressed by
Chinese workers,'' Weingrod says. ''Culturally, the Chinese
put a very high premium on not losing face. In
manufacturing, that translates into not making mistakes on
the production line. Their self-discipline and their
ability to adapt are key factors driving Chinese
competitiveness.'' And for every worker disinclined or
unable to apply himself with energy and concentration,
there is always another poor Chinese worker waiting to
escape the farm or adrift in the so-called floating
population of the underemployed, willing to take his place.


Still, it's not only cheap labor that drives China's
economy. ''If you look just at low wages, you overlook the
talents of Chinese manufacturers to drive their costs
down,'' Weingrod says. The best operations are as efficient
and as responsive as the world's elite manufacturers.

China's miracle economy can come at you in a lot of ways.
By now most of us know that China is the factory floor of
choice for the world's low-road manufacturing: it assembles
more toys, stitches more shoes and sews more garments than
any other nation in the world. But moving up the
technological ladder, China has also become the world's
largest maker of consumer electronics, like TV's, DVD
players and cellphones. And more recently, China is
climbing even higher still, moving into biotech and
high-tech computer manufacturing. No country has ever made
a better run at climbing every step of economic development
all at once. Behind China's rapid economic ascendancy over
the last 25 (and especially last 10) years is the basic
fact of China's huge population. China is home to close to
1.5 billion people, probably, which would make the official
census count of 1.3 billion too low by an amount equal to
roughly the population of Germany, France and the United
Kingdom combined. China has 100 cities of more than a
million people. Since economic liberalization began in
1978, under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese have started tens of
millions of businesses. The number of Chinese who have left
farms and now trawl the cities for work probably exceeds
the entire work force of the United States.

China is not home to the cheapest work force in the world.
Even at 25 cents an hour, Chinese workers cost more than
laborers in the poorer countries of Southeast Asia or
Africa. In the world's miserable corners, children carry
rifles and walk mine fields for less than a dollar a day.
China is the world's workshop because it sits in a
relatively stable region and offers manufacturers a
reliable, pliant and capable industrial work force, groomed
by generations of government-enforced discipline.

The other great contributing factor is the migration of
hundreds of millions of peasants from the countryside now
that the government makes it easier for them to leave.
Indeed, the country's embrace of market capitalism over the
last decade and the government's insistence that farmers
fend for themselves are combining forces to all but evict
peasants from the land. The plots allotted to farm families
are on average 1.2 acres but can be as small as an eighth
of acre; in hundreds of millions of cases these farms fail
to generate enough money for a family. Average city
incomes, according to the Chinese government, are $1,000 a
year, which is three times what they are in the
countryside. That disparity has set in motion the largest
human migration in history. By 2010, nearly half of all
China's people will live in urban areas.

What these numbers mean is that China's people must be
regarded as the critical mass in a new world order. The
productive might of China's vast low-cost manufacturing
machine, along with the swelling appetites of its
billion-plus consumers, have turned China's people into
probably the greatest natural resource on the planet. How
the Chinese (and the rest of the world) use that resource
will shape our economy (and every other economy in the
world) as powerfully as American industrialization and
expansion has over the last hundred years.

We Have Created a Monster

In the political debate over
trade and jobs, China is the place where the world's
companies choose to exploit low-cost manufacturing. The
framing of this debate implies that American consumers and
businesses have strong choices in the market; in fact,
China, supplying ever more goods as it does, in ever more
varieties and at ever better prices, is straitjacketing the
choices of American businesses. China's size does not
merely enable low-cost manufacturing; it forces it.
Increasingly, it is what Chinese businesses and consumers
choose for themselves that determines how the American
economy operates. The American political debate on China's
economic threat overlooks this dynamic entirely.

The experience of Motorola, the U.S. telecommunications
giant, offers a lesson in how China's size changes the
rules of competition and consumption there and everywhere
else.

Every month, five million new subscribers sign up for
mobile-phone service in China. The country's 300 million
mobile-phone users make China by far the largest such
market in the world (and hundreds of millions more accounts
are up for grabs). Hence the world's makers of handsets
need to be in China. It gives them a chance to grow at a
time when the big European and U.S. markets are saturated.
Not that it's a seller's market: for equipment makers,
China is also the most competitive and protean environment
in the world. New manufacturers appear out of nowhere; new
phones materialize daily at big-city stores. There are 800
current handset models to choose from. Young urban
consumers change phones on average after only eight months
-- they sell them to someone else or pass them to family
members. Mobile phones in the hands of migrant construction
workers, whose annual wages might not cover the cost of a
phone, are a common sight in Shanghai and Beijing.

And this mobile-phone market in China is one that Motorola
invented.

For Robert Galvin, the company's former and longtime chief
executive, China in the early- to mid-80's promised a
market that could more than make up for Motorola's having
been foiled in Japan for years. But first the company had
to develop a top-drawer telecommunications infrastructure.
In an unscripted bold stroke at a dreary state ceremony
during a tour of the country, Galvin turned to the minister
of railroads and asked him whether he wanted to do a good
job as minister and be done with it or whether he wanted to
create a world-class society. In doing so, Galvin tapped a
thick vein of economic patriotism.

Motorola's company archives on its move into China are deep
and open. They show that Galvin and his team knew that
eventually the transfer of technology to China would sow
formidable Chinese competitors. Nevertheless, Motorola
decided its best strategy was to get into China early.
Before long, Motorola's reports to China's political
leaders -- infused with the same missionary vocabulary on
industrial quality that had made the company a model for
American manufacturers -- were soon parroted by China's
leadership. Galvin also brought Motorola's best technology
to China. The proof today is in the size and efficacy of
the country's mobile communications network: calls get
through to phones in high-rises, subway cars and distant
hamlets -- connections that would stymie mobile phones in
the U.S.

What no one at Motorola saw was that the Chinese market
would become the most competitive one of all. Nokia and
Motorola now battle for market share in the Chinese handset
business. German, Korean and Taiwanese makers figure
strongly. And all these foreign brands are now facing
intense competition from indigenous Chinese phone makers.
''Competition goes through a cycle in China,'' says Zirui
Tian, a researcher at Insead, the French business school.
''At first the foreigners can make things at much lower
cost than the Chinese. But as local companies come along to
supply the multinational companies, the supply network
expands very fast. Then local Chinese manufacturers can
start to source their parts in China and drive the prices
of their products far lower than the multinationals.''

One of Motorola's most important suppliers is the battery
maker BYD Company Ltd., based in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong.
In only a decade, the private company has gone from virtual
invisibility to owning more than 50 percent of the global
market in mobile-phone batteries. Before BYD, phone
batteries were made in highly automated plants, like those
run by Sanyo and Sony in Japan. But BYD, like Wanfeng,
stripped robots and other machines out of the manufacturing
process and replaced them with an army of workers. By
paying for Chinese salaries, and not for million-dollar
American, German or Japanese machines, BYD slashed the
price of batteries. Initially the company could not meet
Motorola's quality demands, but the American company sent a
team of engineers to work with the upstarts, and six months
later BYD earned a Six Sigma certification, a universally
recognized badge of quality (which Motorola itself
invented). The fact that in China machines can be replaced
by people for huge cost savings and without sacrifice in
quality changes the competitive landscape of the global
marketplace. When Motorola and Nokia were pressed to lower
their prices by Chinese competitors, they turned to BYD.

One of the biggest challenges facing Motorola and other
global manufacturers is that Chinese suppliers are getting
too good. Their quality, low-priced parts have helped
create new, homegrown and extremely aggressive competitors.
More than 40 percent of the Chinese domestic handset market
now belongs to local companies like Ningbo Bird, Nanjing
Panda Electronics, Haier and TCL Mobile. Ningbo Bird will
produce 20 million handsets in 2004 and is likely soon to
nudge its way into the ranks of the top 10 mobile phone
makers in the world. Yet Motorola can't exactly exit the
Chinese market. If it did, says Jim Gradoville, Motorola's
vice president of Asia Pacific government relations, the
Chinese companies that emerged from the crucible of their
market would be the leanest and most aggressive in the
world, and a company like his would have no idea what hit
it. So Motorola stays. Already the largest foreign investor
in China's electronics industry, Motorola plans to triple
its stake there to more than $10 billion by 2006.

More Power to the Chinese Consumers

Generalizing about
Chinese business always raises exceptions. The country's
crazy quilt of state-owned, village-owned, private and
hybrid businesses was stitched together over 25 years of
rocky reforms. Peasant entrepreneurs, opportunistic
officials, government planners, new urban sophisticates and
foreign investors all created operations that best fit the
moment they stepped into the evolving market economy. And
yet, looking at the marketplace from the broadest
perspective, one overwhelming fact stands out. Ninety
percent of everything made in China is in oversupply; in
other words, nearly every manufacturing industry has
surplus capacity. And instead of using cheap labor to push
their profit margins higher, Chinese companies use cheap
labor to drive down prices to the sweet spots for the great
mass of Chinese consumers.

A Chinese family can live a life comfortably close to that
of the American middle class for a fraction of the cost.
Though China claims urban per-capita income is $1,000,
''the government numbers on incomes don't tell nearly the
whole story on the consumer class, especially not in the
eastern cities,'' says Merrill Weingrod of China
Strategies. Weingrod, working with Linsun Cheng of the
University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, surveyed incomes
in Shanghai and several other cities in industrial centers.
''People tend to have two and three jobs, with many taking
in short-term assignments here and there,'' he says. ''Real
income in Shanghai, for instance, is close to $2,500 per
capita, $5,000 per household.'' The Chinese can, on
average, buy nearly five times in goods and services per
dollar what an American can with the same dollar in the
U.S. ''If you multiply income against China's purchasing
power parity,'' Weingrod says, ''Chinese urban incomes
approach the buying power of Americans making $12,500 a
year. For working couples, that's the equal of $25,000. Do
the math, and you can understand why Shanghai looks as
prosperous as it does and why it seems like everyone is out
shopping all the time.''

According to Weingrod's and Cheng's research, China now has
100 million people who are comfortably middle class. They
buy (in reduced measure) what the American middle class
buys. The allure of China's market is obvious: the huge
volumes of potential sales mean even products with the most
modest of margins can earn lots of money.

Wilf Corrigan, the chairman and C.E.O. of LSI Logic, an
American company in the Chinese video player market, says
that Chinese manufacturers have short-circuited one of the
most predictable trends in consumer electronic
manufacturing. ''Typically,'' he says, ''a new technology
would be released at $1,000 in Japan, and it would take two
years to drop below $1,000 and make it to the U.S. and
Europe, and it would take a total of five to seven years
for it to make it into the mass market.'' As features were
added, prices rose. Now China's low-cost labor and the
vastness of its consumer population are combining to bring
bargain electronics into homes in record time. Chinese
companies build sophisticated goods with components
produced locally and rush them by the millions into their
huge domestic market. New companies arise. Competition
shrinks the time it takes for new products to appear. New
features are added while prices are likely to drop.
Anything to pump sales.

Corrigan's company is now supplying Chinese consumer
electronics manufacturers with the chip sets they need to
make digital video recorders, machines that record DVD's
and that are displacing VCR's on retail shelves. Currently,
the Japanese and Korean brand-name giants have consumers'
attention. Corrigan, however, sees no reason DVR's won't go
the way of DVD players, plummeting in price as the Chinese
enter the competition. Expect the recorders to be on sale
for $100 within the next two years.

Collective I.Q.

'Look, China is the most exciting place in the world right
now to be a manufacturer,'' says Mark Wall, president of
the greater China region for G.E. Plastics. His operation
sells the plastic pellets used to make everything from
DVD's to building materials. Within two years G.E. will
sell $1 billion in advanced materials, including plastics,
in China. Wall, who came to China from G.E. Plastics,
Brazil, describes a country in love with manufacturing like
no other, where engineers come in excited and readily work
long days. Where university students clamor to get into
engineering and applied sciences. Like many American
manufacturing executives in China, Wall talks about working
in China with the delight that young computer whizzes felt
when they found cool in Silicon Valley. There's no going to
a cocktail party and then trying to talk around the fact
that you make things in factories. Wall says he feels at
home. He loves it. G.E. has every plan to capitalize on the
local zeal for manufacturing. It recently opened a giant
industrial research center in Shanghai, and by next year
will it employ 1,200 people in its Chinese labs. The
company has also set up scholarship programs at leading
Chinese technical universities. It will have no shortage of
good candidates.

The government is pouring resources into creating the
world's largest army of industrialists. China has 17
million university and advanced vocational students (up
more than threefold in five years), the majority of whom
are in science and engineering. China will produce 325,000
engineers this year. That's five times as many as in the
U.S., where the number of engineering graduates has been
declining since the early 1980's. It is hard to imagine
Americans' enthusiasm for engineering sinking lower. Forty
percent of all students who enter universities on the
engineering track change their minds.

The case for the ability of American industry to stay ahead
of its international competition rests on the national
gifts and resources that the U.S. devotes to innovation.
Certainly, the confidence of big American companies like
Motorola, General Motors and Intel, all of which have
billion-dollar-plus stakes in China, is based on the
brainpower they have at home. The research gap between the
U.S. and China remains vast. In December, Washington
authorized $3.7 billion to finance nanotechnology research,
a sum the Chinese government cannot easily match within a
scientific infrastructure that would itself take many more
billions (and years) to build. Yet, when it comes to more
mainstream, applied industrial development and innovation,
the separation among Chinese, American and other
multinational firms is beginning to narrow.

Last year, China spent $60 billion on research and
development. The only countries that spent more were the
U.S and Japan, which spent $282 billion and $104 billion
respectively. But again, China forces you to do the math:
China's engineers and scientists usually make between
one-sixth and one-tenth what Americans do, which means that
the wide gaps in financing do not necessarily result in
equally wide gaps in manpower or results. The U.S. spent
nearly five times what China did, but had less than two
times as many researchers (1.3 million to 743,000).

For now, the emphasis in Chinese labs is weighted
overwhelmingly toward the ''D'' side -- meaning training
for technical employees and managers. Nevertheless, foreign
companies are quickly moving to integrate their China-based
labs into their global research operations. Motorola has 19
research labs in China that develop technology for both the
local and global markets. Several of the company's most
innovative recent phones were developed there for the
Chinese market.

Motorola's newest research center is located 40 minutes
from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, a province in
southwestern China. Sichuan is slightly larger than
California, but three times as populous. There are around
90 million people in the province, 43 universities and 1.2
million scientists and engineers. Sichuan's fragmented
transportation system prevents Chengdu from rivaling the
eastern powerhouses as a manufacturing center, but the city
is promoting the advantage of its plentiful, relatively
low-cost brain pool with its new research corridor, the
West High-Tech Zone. And Motorola regards its building --
subsidized generously by the development zone -- as a world
center for software engineering. The company now employs
more than 150 developers there and has plans to add
hundreds more. That will pit it against a growing number of
the world's top research-driven enterprises taking
advantage of Chengdu's largess: Intel, Ericsson, D-Link,
Siemens, Alcatel, Mitsui & Company and Fuji Heavy
Industries of Japan and more than 200 other firms in one of
the area's special tech districts.

In all, foreign companies have been involved in
establishing between 200 and 400 of their own research
centers in China since 1990. China's People's Daily has
reported that 400 of the world's transnational corporations
have set up research and development projects in China. In
part, tax incentives attract such financing. But the
biggest incentive of all, of course, is access to China's
consumers. The Chinese government knows that foreign tech
companies can be coaxed into sharing technology and
training in exchange for easier access to the Chinese
marketplace. The World Trade Organization forbids formal
bargains that demand international tech transfers, but it
does not police winks and nudges.

The likely outcome of all this R.&D. investment in China?
Even more overcapacity. Just as China's abundant unskilled
workers feed the world more shoes and more gadgets than it
needs -- or at least more than it can absorb without
forcing prices down -- China's abundance of newly skilled
industrialists threatens to swamp the world's most highly
prized, high-tech markets. The Wall Street Journal reported
earlier this year that in the past three years foreign
investors have invested or pledged $15 billion to build 19
new semiconductor factories. China imports 80 percent of
the semiconductor chips it needs, $19 billion worth, and
the government has made it a point of national pride to end
the country's dependence on foreigners. Industry observers
seem to agree that China will be able to compete with the
world's leading semiconductor makers in a decade, but even
before that it may exert strong downward pressure on chip
prices. Will there be a 2005 recession in the chip market?
Morris Chang, the influential founder of Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world's largest dedicated
independent semiconductor foundry, asked an industry
gathering last September. ''Yes, I think there will be,''
he said. And who will cause it? China, thanks to all the
capacity it's building.

The China Price

China now offers the world a labor supply with depth unlike
anything ever seen. In a recent policy brief for the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sandra Polaski,
a former State Department special representative for
international labor affairs, writes that to put things in
perspective, ''if all U.S. jobs were moved to China, there
would still be surplus labor in China.'' That fact
highlights what is most sobering about China's booming
economy: it can force down the value of work in any job
that is at all transferable.

In American business this is called the ''China price.'' It
is the price American suppliers to other American
businesses have to match to keep their customers. It is the
price at which Chinese manufacturers can deliver the same
goods and services. Last November, the Chicago Federal
Reserve Bank noted the complaints that ''automakers have
reportedly been asking suppliers for the 'China price' on
their purchases.'' It also observed that U.S. suppliers had
been asked by their big customers to relocate production to
China, or to find subcontractors there.

The bellwether of American industry may very well be its
foundries. Casting is one of those unsexy industries that
rarely get top mention in personal ads. But no amount of
buzz could overstate its importance. Without metal casting,
the United States would boast hardly any industry at all.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration of the
Department of Energy notes that more than 90 percent of all
manufactured goods and capital equipment use metal
castings, or are made with equipment that uses them.

The American casting industry is the world's largest, with
more than $25 billion in annual sales. Nearly 3,000
foundries are spread across the country, and are especially
concentrated in the Midwest. Most are small businesses,
with fewer than 100 employees who, on average, outearn
their counterparts everywhere else in the world. The
metal-casting industry once had generous trade surpluses
with the rest of the world, but imported castings have
increased their share of the American market by 50 percent
since the mid-1990's; they now have 15 percent of the
market. Imports from China are growing at between 7 and 10
percent a year, and worldwide by volume China is now the
top producer of castings. The effect has been severe
pressure on American foundries, 140 of which closed their
doors in 2002, the last year for which the American Foundry
Society has figures.

Bob Schuemann is executive vice president and part owner of
Signicast Corporation, a privately held casting business
located at the edge of Hartford, Wis. Hartford is one of
the state's many midsize towns whose roads are shared by
farm tractors and semitrailer trucks making their way to
the loading docks of manufacturers that since the 1970's
have stayed competitive by migrating out of the urban
Midwest and into the more economical countryside.
Schuemann, like many, now lives under the sword of the
China price. His company owns proprietary technology for
producing metal machine parts with extremely high
precision. Yet the network effect means that the company's
fate is tied in part to the economic vitality of its
business community. Wisconsin lost roughly 90,000 of the
2.8 million U.S. manufacturing jobs that disappeared over
the last four years. Signicast survived with automation.
Robots fill its factory, moving everything from thumb-size
precision parts to the boxes in the warehouse. Workers are
scarce. Walking through the plant is a lesson in how the
hardware business has become a software business. The whole
plant seems to be run by smart ghosts.

Even so, the company feels the gravity of China's growing
influence in manufacturing. Schuemann says some of his
corporate customers also want the company to make the move
to China and have offered to help cover the costs of doing
so. The company won't move. Schuemann fears the Chinese
will usurp Signicast's processes and thus its strength.
Schuemann knows too that his company's selling points
evaporate quickly when overseas investment casters
drastically undercut the price of its parts. ''We don't
need to match the China price dollar for dollar,'' he says.
''If we stay within 20 percent of their price, our
customers will stay with us.'' It's getting harder to keep
them anyway, however. The company used to have livelier
business with a big local power tool maker, but the
customer moved production to China and found jerry-built
substitutes for Signicast's high-quality parts. ''Our part
was one sturdy piece, and their new one is two inferior
pieces,'' Schuemann says. ''Theirs will break more easily,
but it's a lot cheaper.''

The business cards of executives at Milwaukee Valve Company
Ltd., located in Wuxi, a city of more than four million
outside Shanghai, list the company's address at ''End of
Guangrui Road.'' By the outward appearance of the trio of
decades-old, corrugated-tin roofed industrial buildings
that make up the small factory, ''end of the road'' might
seem an apt description. Along the interior of a wall at
the back of the factory yard is a pile of wooden kindling
that is used to stoke the factory's large furnace when the
local electric grid is out of power, which lately has been
often. Inside one of the barns, the furnace's orange glow
heats and dimly lights a shop that looks little different
than that of a foundry early in the last century. Sandboxes
with molten brass are assembled manually and set end to end
in the black earth floor to cool.

While the method looks primitive -- the Chinese have been
making castings for 2,500 years -- workers in Wuxi manage
to produce quality castings comparable to those made in
spiffier factories in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Milwaukee
Valve is a family-owned company whose manufacturing is
still anchored in the United States. Its management entered
China 20 years ago, soon after economic liberalization
began. The company's valves are critical components in
pipelines used in many industries. A faulty valve produced
by one of the company's Chinese suppliers several years ago
nearly ended the relationship with China. But that mistake,
according to the company's management, is what made this
Chinese manufacturer a ''world-class operation.'' Engineers
from both countries redesigned the valve and changed the
production process. Since then, Milwaukee Valve has
stationed five Chinese quality-control engineers as roving
inspectors at all of its factories in China. Apply this
learning-curve experience at the Wuxi plant to China's
manufacturing economy generally, and you get a sense of how
the country is moving up the manufacturing feeding chain so
quickly. (Of course, no one would be interested in seeing
the Chinese improve if the cost of high quality were not
still a bargain.)

Out in front of the valve factory is another telling symbol
of China's competitiveness. It is a small $2,000 truck, a
circus car of a truck, and one of many quaint but operable
models still turned out by China's state-owned vehicle
factories. In the U.S., cheap trucks prone to failure and
always in need of new parts would wreck production and
delivery schedules by causing down time and burden bottom
lines with $50-an-hour mechanic bills. But in China,
mechanics can tend such cheap trucks the way pit crews tend
Indy cars -- and for less than a dollar an hour. Chinese
factories can take advantage of all sorts of machinery that
is one, two or three generations past its usefulness in
more expensive economies, because the Chinese can afford to
run them and fix them. Thus China wrings further cost
savings from the manufacturing process, and American
companies are forced to go there to get them.

''First there was the wholesale price, then the retail
price and now there is the China price, and it is very
real,'' says Oded Shenkar, a professor at the Fisher
College of Business at Ohio State University. Big
manufacturers, Shenkar says, come into their American
suppliers with the China price in hand and present
ultimatums, often veiled, that the price be met.

The China Savings

No politician declares it. There is no
Association of Big Box Store Customers beating the drum.
But, as nearly any shopping trip in America will teach you,
China saves American consumers enormous amounts of money.

The worry that Chinese producers are hurting American
businesses and eliminating American jobs misrepresents the
problem -- at least geographically. While the U.S. trade
deficit with China is growing, most of the goods from
China, between 60 and 75 percent of them, simply would have
been imported in past years from other countries. Still,
because the China price forces manufacturers the world over
to drop their own prices, the jobs that have not moved have
been shaken up all the same, in the U.S. and in other
countries. In Mexico, for example, which has lost nearly
half a million manufacturing jobs and 500 maquiladora
manufacturers, workers earn four times what their Chinese
counterparts do. So for Mexican factories to stay
competitive, they must get by with fewer hands or smaller
profits.

Americans who would demonize China also have a local
problem: the China price is a boon to American consumers.
Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Institute for
International Economics, has done some rough math that
shows how. ''From time immemorial,'' Hufbauer says, ''most
American and Japanese businesses have been reluctant to
move their manufacturing to new locales unless they can
save at least 10 to 20 percent with the move.'' For the
$152 billion worth of goods coming in from China last year,
those savings have already been realized.

The multiplier effect on the rest of the world's
manufacturers, however, dwarfs the savings that come
directly from China. Hufbauer figures some $500 billion in
goods come from countries that are China's low-wage
competitors, and another $450 billion in goods come from
China's American and Japanese competitors. That means
savings on nearly a trillion dollars of goods. If the
savings on that non-Chinese trillion dollars' worth of
trade are just 3 to 5 percent, rather than the 20 percent
the Chinese can deliver, Hufbauer calculates further
savings starting at $500 for the average American
household. And people who spend more, get more back. Have a
drawer full of $3 T-shirts, a DVD player in every room, a
Christmas tree annually encircled with piles of toys? You
probably have tons more stuff -- and additional savings --
thanks to the China price.

This inexorable downward pressure on prices now shows up
even when the prices of raw materials rise, costs that in
the past were hurriedly passed on to consumers. The Chinese
industrial boom has, for example, pushed up the cost of
copper, aluminum, nickel, plastics and nearly every other
important industrial commodity. Chinese demand has caused
the price of steel to rise 20 percent this past spring.
(China is now the world's top steel producer, by the way,
while the U.K. has dropped out of the top 10.)
Nevertheless, the price of cars, which reflect nearly the
entire commodity index, has been weak. In April, cotton
climbed to its highest price at this time of year in seven
seasons, but the price of clothing declined.

American firms can find it hard to compete. ''China hits
domestic U.S. manufacturers twice,'' Oded Shenkar says.
''They drive down the price of goods, but they drive up the
price of raw materials. It's a wholly different
environment.'' And yet it's a good one for Americans too.

The efficiencies forced on the market by Chinese factories
also hold U.S. inflation in check. Lower inflation means
the Federal Reserve can keep interest rates low, making
money more freely available for investment in new and
stronger industries. Chinese competition forces American
businesses -- Signicast, for example -- to use capital as
efficiently as possible. And to run their plants full tilt.
And to find ways to save on labor costs. The Americans who
lost manufacturing jobs over the last three years, and the
millions more who are expected to see their white-collar
jobs migrate overseas, may have not only China to blame,
but also the very economic benefits that China has provided
for them.

And that's to say nothing of what happens once the Chinese
countryside, thinned of its oversupply of farmers, turns
into efficient farms. Already the Chinese have their eyes
on cash crops. Though it has only recently begun exporting
apple juice, China already produces seven times as many
apples as the U.S., enough to cause a depression in the
price of apple juice worldwide. Whole apples for exports
are individually wrapped by hand in a foam sock. Given the
country's wealth of manual labor, it can assert dominance
in crops that must be tended by hand.


In a stable China, where its great resource, its people,
are allowed to work and spend money in a reasonably well
functioning market economy, the growing place of China in a
global economy cannot be legislated away with tariffs,
quotas or tax incentives for struggling industries. China's
strengths cannot be altered by changes in the value of its
currency or by restricting the flow of foreign investment
into the country. By having changed itself, China is
changing the world.

That doesn't necessarily mean things will be worse for
Americans as the century -- the Chinese century -- unfolds.
Following World War II, the nations of Western Europe,
Japan and the so-called tiger countries of Asia rose from
the ruins, aided, not thwarted, by the strength of the
American economy. In turn, those economic booms fed our
own.

So perhaps we will be as Europe is to us today, and China
will be our America.

Imagine Pekin, Ill., a few decades from now. It may, like
innumerable small Chinese cities today, be accustomed to a
stream of foreign business managers. Perhaps the regional
boss for a Wanfeng Automotive dealership is there to be
host of a ''dig to China contest'': the team that gets
closest in 40 minutes might win one of the company's hot
new red-and-gold Lucky 8 hybrid sports coupes, worth
$4,000. As a promotion, Wal-Mart's new World Store is
rolling prices back to 2004 levels for the day -- shoppers
are grabbing the steaks and fish, whose prices Chinese
consumers have driven up fourfold since then. Wal-Mart
might have competition, however, perhaps from a new giant
outpost of Homeworld, a Chinese retail giant that has
learned to exploit its proximity to Chinese suppliers and
beat Wal-Mart on price. A big event scheduled for the
evening might get knowing smiles from the town's
old-timers. The Foreign Devils, a high-school basketball
team from Manhattan, a new suburb of Beijing, is due in for
an exhibition game. Provided its flight, on an all new
Chinese jumbo jet, arrives on time.




Ted C. Fishman, a contributing editor for Harper's
Magazine, is writing a book about China's place in the
world. This is his first cover article for The Times
Magazine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/magazine/04CHINA.html?ex=1090005058&ei=1&en=9a341c096b403be1


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