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 [好文同享]The Rise Of China |
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浴火
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作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Tensions rise as economic power tilts
By James Cox, USA TODAY
China saved Eveleth, Minn., but it's killing Fort Payne, Ala.
Eveleth is the tiny Iron Range town where Chinese investors bought and reopened a bankrupt ore mine. In a novel swap, they ship Eveleth's ore to buyers in Canada, so Canadian ore can be loaded on ships bound for steel mills back in China.
By Hoang Dinh Nam, USA TODAY
A Chinese man examines progress on his shrimp farm. Shrimp imports have been curtailed in the U.S.
Fort Payne calls itself the Sock Capital of the World, and boasts 95 sock factories. Chinese-made athletic socks held a 1% market share in the USA three years ago, but today they're crowding Fort Payne's socks off the shelves at Wal-Mart and Kmart. Left unchecked, the Chinese could grab 75% of the U.S. market by 2007, domestic sock makers say.
Eveleth and Fort Payne are just two examples of the powerful crosscurrents buffeting the U.S. economy as China becomes an economic power in its own right. The two economies certainly complement each other. The USA supplies China with technology, investment and managerial know-how. China provides American consumers with a vast array of inexpensive goods. But more and more, China's breakneck development affects American wages, jobs, prices and industries, determining who wins and loses in the U.S. economy. (Flash graphic: Comparing the U.S. and China)
Consider shrimp. Giant aqua-farming operations in China have helped transform a once-expensive delicacy into America's most popular seafood. Today, imports account for 90% of U.S. shrimp sales.
That's good for shrimp lovers, but bad for U.S. shrimpers plying their trade with boats and nets. The shrimpers say cheap, farm-raised Chinese shrimp threatens their livelihoods. To protect them, the Commerce Department last month slapped anti-dumping penalties of up to 113% on Chinese shrimp.
Restaurants and seafood distributors howled that prices would go up and people would eat fewer shrimp. But the penalties also brought cries from less predictable quarters: American farmers who sell soy meal to China as feed for shrimp farms. China buys more American soybeans than any other country — 36% of U.S. soybean exports last year.
Rival or partner?
So is China a rival or partner?
Clearly, it's both.
Battered American manufacturers say China suppresses the prices of its exports by up to 40% by keeping its currency artificially weak. To do so, Beijing keeps the yuan at a fixed rate in relation to the U.S. dollar. To make that work, it has to use its own currency to buy up any dollars floating around in its economy. In the process, it has amassed $471 billion in foreign reserves.
That's bad, right? Not if you've bought a home or refinanced your mortgage lately. China spends its dollars on U.S. Treasury securities, and, by doing so, helps keep interest rates down for American borrowers.
That's good, right? Not necessarily, says Jeffrey Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management. "It's a sword of Damocles over the United States. We never want to be in a position where any foreign government has so much influence over our interest rates," he says.
Motorola, Intel, Kodak, General Motors and countless other American companies have poured $40 billion to $50 billion into China, much of it in manufacturing. Critics accuse them of exporting American jobs as they go in search of low-wage labor.
The AFL-CIO says 727,000 Americans have lost their jobs as a result of China's unfair labor practices. The union group calculates that China depresses the pay of its own workers by up to 86% by denying them collective bargaining rights, safe working conditions and a minimum wage. That, in turn, depresses the cost of Chinese-made goods by as much as 44%, the AFL-CIO says.
Those figures are "close to worthless," says Nicholas Lardy, economist and China specialist at the Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank. "They pile on assumption after assumption after assumption. You get to a result that isn't plausible."
But even if the numbers held up, they wouldn't tell the whole story.
Yes, it's true, cheaper toys and lawn furniture from China translate into bigger savings for American consumers. But China's growing prosperity offers another, less obvious benefit to Americans, says Yasheng Huang, a professor of international management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.
If you own shares of Microsoft or Ford Motor or Wal-Mart — even through a mutual fund — you also own a piece of China, he says. "Americans directly benefit because many of them, through their investments in big U.S. firms, derive dividends from China's rise" as U.S. companies profit there, Huang says.
The USA is the world's largest economy, with annual output of $11 trillion. China, No. 2 at $6.5 trillion, is the fastest-growing economy, barreling ahead at average annual growth rates of 9% a year. In 2002, China surpassed the USA as the world's leading destination for foreign investment.
Today, the two economies have a "fragile interdependence," Garten says. He predicts they will be the two main engines of global economic growth for decades.
A re-emerging power
Yet China isn't emerging so much as re-emerging. The Chinese economy outperformed Western Europe's for more than 1,000 years, until the 16th century. After that, China stagnated, and its economic output stayed virtually flat for three centuries. But even as recently as 1820, China was responsible for 33% of world GDP. By comparison, America's share of world output peaked in 1950 at 27%.
China stirred from its hibernation in 1978, taking the first tentative steps toward reforming its state-dominated economy by opening to the outside world. Twenty-six years later, it is effectively the world's factory floor. To stoke its factories, it needs natural resources and raw materials. Increasingly, that means it sets — or plays a big part in setting — global prices for everything from timber and oil to nickel and industrial diamonds.
Last week, U.S. Steel cited strong demand in China as a factor behind its second consecutive quarterly profit following a year of losses. What's notable about that? U.S. Steel doesn't sell anything in China. Instead, huge demand there helps keep imported steel out of the USA and allows domestic steelmakers to maintain higher prices.
The Chinese economic machine is so voracious it is gobbling up the world's unwanted industrial junk. Chinese buyers are scouring the USA and other countries for scrap metal, used copper cable, recycled plastic and second-hand pipe for use back home.
Nowhere outside of China is demand as strong for fertilizer and stainless steel, or for the acrylic resin molding used to make appliances and the ethylene glycol used in polyester. China is the world's largest broadband DSL market, even though only a tiny fraction of its population uses the Internet. It buys more than any other country when it comes to cell phones, pig vaccines, seafood, air conditioning equipment and odor-control gear for wastewater treatment plants. It is the globe's leading market for English-language tutors and study aids, as well as for logistics experts.
After the USA, China is the biggest market for commercial airplanes. Next year, it will race past Japan to be No. 2 in sales of cars and trucks. Soon, it is expected to be the biggest market for computer monitors and jewelry.
The shipping industry, enjoying its biggest boom in nearly 40 years, can thank China for the high times. The world's sea lanes are clogged with Chinese freight; new and used merchant vessels are fetching record prices; shipping lines are issuing IPOs and seeking mergers.
China's economic clout
It shouldn't come as a surprise that China's scale is finally translating into economic clout, says Stephen Green, a China specialist and economist at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. After all, there are 4.5 times more Chinese (1.3 billion) than Americans (300 million) and six times more Chinese workers — 760 million to 130 million.
By 2020, China will have a middle class of 200 million, vs. 186 million for the USA, says Ming-Jer Chen, a business strategy expert at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. At that point, he predicts, America's service-based economy will find it is competing on new fronts with the Chinese — battling for dominance in banking, insurance, telecommunications and other service industries.
But Americans already feel pain from China's rise. That's because, "China is finally doing what it should have been doing for the last 100 years — exploiting its natural competitive advantage in labor-intensive, manufactured goods," Green says.
And there's plenty to exploit. American manufacturing workers earned an average $16.14 an hour in 2001. Their Chinese counterparts earned 61 cents a hour, says the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank.
Chinese companies benefit from the weak yuan, cheap bank loans, rent-free factory space and subsidized energy. But those factors "aren't the reason the U.S. furniture and textile industries are being smashed apart" by Chinese competitors, Green argues. "It's simply wage rates."
China's growing clout magnifies its disputes with the United States. Matters that might be irritants between other countries are major sources of friction.
No country can match China when it comes to getting hit with U.S. trade penalties. Fifty-six separate Chinese products — pipe fittings, color TVs, fence posts, folding chairs, honey, brake rotors, paper clips and others — are subject to punitive duties because they're sold here at below-cost prices or because companies making them received subsidies. Japan is next, with 32 penalized products.
"There's a myth that if trade penalties are imposed on China, then all these jobs somehow come back to the U.S. The reality is these jobs are no longer competitive in the U.S. If sanctions forced them out of China, they are far more likely to move to another low-cost country," says Mark Mechem, director of business advisory services at the U.S.-China Business Council, a trade and lobbying group of U.S. companies.
Expect more friction. American textile companies, alarmed that country-specific quotas come off Jan. 1, say they will drown in a flood of Chinese goods within two years unless the Bush administration takes steps to limit imports from China.
"China has the potential to literally take over the world in textile and apparel trade," says Cass Johnson of the National Council of Textile Organizations.
More worrisome, the USA ran a $124 billion trade deficit with China last year, its biggest gap ever with any country. And while Chinese imports of U.S. goods are growing at a faster rate than U.S. imports from China, the overall trade gap is going to be even bigger this year.
If anything, Yale's Garten says, China's impact on the U.S. economy is only going to grow. The two countries will struggle to make room for one another, he says.
"We've never been exposed to an onslaught of this magnitude," he says. "And what we're seeing now are just the initial convulsions."
作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 [好文同享]The Rise Of China -- 浴火 - (11336 Byte) 2004-8-14 周六, 04:43 (1281 reads)
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