China's rising star challenges America By Keith Bradsher The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2005 GUANGZHOU, China Behind the headlines over the past week about big Chinese bids for American companies and China's debut as a car exporter lies a much broader challenge to a half-century of American economic and political ascendance, a challenge that goes beyond the one that came from Japan nearly a generation ago. Chinese manufacturing companies are building wealth at a remarkable rate and using some of that money to buy assets abroad. And China has been scouring the world to acquire energy resources, with the bid to buy Unocal, the American oil company, only the latest overture. Fierce domestic competition and a faster accumulation of financial assets are laying the groundwork for the arc of China's rise to be far greater than Japan's. "It's going to be like the Arabs in the '70s and the Japanese in the '80s - we were worried they'd buy everything," said William Belchere, the chief Asia economist for Macquarie Securities in Hong Kong. But by comparison with those challenges, which faded, Belchere said, China in the longer term will be "a much bigger force." China's economy has risen rapidly with foreign expertise and investment. The Guangzhou airport has a terminal designed by an American company, boarding gates supplied by a Danish company and an air-traffic control tower engineered by a company from Singapore. The resulting bilateral corporate tango - in contrast to the confrontations reminiscent of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Japanese capital poured into the United States - means that China has many American corporate comrades who have a stake in helping generate its growth. China, say economists and Asia experts, does not face some of the inherent limitations that ultimately stymied Japan and led to economic stagnation there over the past 14 years. With its huge population, China is developing a large and diverse economy, creating for its domestic market an almost Darwinian competition that produces extremely low-cost companies ready to export inexpensive goods around the globe. "The economy is much more flexible, adaptable than Japan's," said Liang Hong, an economist in Hong Kong for Goldman Sachs. "Being a continental economy is an advantage, because it has competition within." But China is still at an earlier stage of economic development than Japan was when its economic rise became a national obsession in the United States. In the 1980s, Japanese companies claimed a sizable chunk of the American car market and purchased Rockefeller Center in New York and the Pebble Beach golf course in California. The bid last week by China National Offshore Oil for Unocal has raised worries among some politicians in Washington. That $18.5 billion bid comes as America's trade deficit with China is ratcheting ever higher and the dollar is getting support from rising inflows of Chinese capital, which also help support low interest rates. More disconcerting to others in Washington is China's growing ability to finance any political and military ambitions. China has a fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that intelligence experts describe as already capable of hitting not just Hawaii but also, probably, California. Beijing also remains chilly to American entreaties to put more pressure on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. In contrast, Japan's military dependence on the United States made it more willing to accept a steep appreciation in the yen in 1985 that hobbled Japanese exporters. So far, China has put off the Bush administration's demands to let its yuan appreciate. But China's economic rise also faces many obstacles. Its banks have huge portfolios of nonperforming loans that have not yet become a crippling problem, because of rapid economic growth, but that could, as in Japan, make a recession someday even harder to combat. China also has a one-party political system that has not changed nearly as quickly as its economy over the past quarter-century and a population that will soon start to age rapidly, reflecting its "one-child" family planning policy. The Asian Development Bank forecasts that between 2015 and 2030, China's labor force will drop to 813 million from 842 million as India's expands. Still, China's population is more than four times that of the United States and 10 times the population of Japan. China has as many people as the entire industrialized world combined, earning wages that despite recent increases are less than one-tenth of Western wages. Liang said that China's average tariff on imported goods, 10.4 percent last year, was considerably lower than Japan's or South Korea's at the same stage in their economic development and showed that Chinese companies were used to competing with foreign rivals. The big question is how smoothly China will make the transition from central planning to capitalism. One of the best places to see the scope of China's challenge to the West, including China's economic strengths and its political weaknesses, is here in Guangzhou, a city of 12.2 million people. Last Friday, the first 150 Chinese-made cars intended for export to the rest of the world rolled onto a ship here, bound for Europe. The cars, made at a gleaming new Honda Motor factory on the outskirts of this sprawling city near Hong Kong, signal the latest move by China to follow Japan and South Korea in building itself into a global competitor in one of the cornerstones of the industrial economy. At the Honda factory, a tall fence of yellow wire mesh encloses a long section of the assembly line, where white robots poke and crane their long, vulture-like heads into gray, half-completed car bodies to perform 2,100 of the 3,000 welds needed to assemble each car. Workers in white uniforms and gray caps complete the rest of the welds, working as quickly as workers in American factories but earning roughly $1.50 an hour in wages and benefits, compared with $55 an hour for General Motors and Ford factories in the United States. As GM and Ford struggle with high health care costs for unionized work forces with an average age of nearly 50 in the United States, most of the Honda workers here appear to be in their 20s. They are unlikely to go to the doctor often, and when they do, doctors here charge less than $5 for an office visit or for administering a few stitches. At a long hall in central Guangzhou, it quickly becomes apparent why the Honda workers are young and the pay is low. Rows of young men and women sit in plastic chairs, watching two huge television screens covered with Chinese characters and numbers. While it resembles an off-track betting parlor in Hong Kong, 160 kilometers or 100 miles down the Pearl River, this is really the city's main, government-run employment center. Some of the employers are hiring dozens of workers at a time, but one of the columns on each screen shows a requirement that would be illegal to list in the United States: the age range for acceptable applicants, most often 20 to 35. The official average unemployment rate in China's cities is 4.2 percent. But that excludes China's vast army of rural adults with little or no work, an army estimated to be as large as 150 million people. Millions move to the cities each year, an immense migration that slowed increases in Chinese industrial wages until the past year or two, when the Chinese economy has grown so rapidly that employers have begun bidding up workers' wages anyway. The plight of these migrants seems to be improving, and as it improves, they may become even more attractive job applicants for multinationals looking around the globe for workers. "People who came here looking for jobs used to be dirty and wearing bad clothes, but now they are coming in suits and ties," said Zhang Jieming, the director of the Guangzhou Bureau of Labor and Social Security. .: Forum Diskusi Budaya Tionghua dan Sejarah Tiongkok :. .: Kunjungi website global : http://www.budaya-tionghoa.org :. .: Untuk bergabung : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/budaya_tionghua :. .: Jaringan pertemanan Friendster : [EMAIL PROTECTED] :. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/budaya_tionghua/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
