本帖最后由 荡漾 于 2009-3-20 00:33 编辑
【原文标题】What's wrong with Shanghai?(partI)
【登载媒体】theglobalist.com
【来源地址】http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=7406
【译者】荡漾
【声明】本翻译供Anti-CNN使用,转载请注明译者及出处,谢谢!
【译文】
尽管上海被誉为全球商业中心,上海的企业家仍然举步维艰。麻省理工学院教授黄亚生著有《有中国特色的资本主义》一书,探讨上海政策偏向于歧视小企业的城市状况。
1992年一本题为《上海:性格即命运》的书在中国成为畅销书。上海市政府赞助了该书的发行并由市长汪道涵题序,该书研究上海的城市特性。
书的主题是关于上海的独特文化,描述为“很大的包容性、多元化、个性化和创造性”。该书还提出上海的复兴归功于对这一独特文化的继承。
从历史上看上海具有创业精神这一观点是正确的。在二十世纪的头三十年里,上海是亚洲主要的商业和金融中心,类似于甚而超过今天香港的地位。
上海是中国最大的纺织企业及银行的发源地,也是包括现在仍为世界大跨国公司在内的许多企业的创始地,这些跨国公司包括汇丰银行以及现在大为失色的美国国际集团(AIG)。
1949年离开上海的工业家们在香港经济中占据几乎绝对统治的地位成为上海具有丰富的创业传统的强有力证据。
香港的经济起飞阶段纺织业是最为重要的工业。近到1977年,香港出口额的47%、受雇工人的45%集中在纺织业。
二十世纪七十年代末期,来自上海的工业家们拥有香港一共30家棉纺机厂中的25家;1947至1959年的十来年间上海的工业家们建立起21家棉纺机厂中的20家。毫不夸张地说香港奇迹是上海奇迹的替身。
但今天上海数不出大型且具知名度的私营企业,而从企业规模来说上海也位处中国后列。
这两个现象是相互联系的,它们可谓上海针对经济发展制定的工业政策的必然结果。
上海的工业政策总是对大型责任公司有利,在上海,大公司能得到补助,而小规模的企业在获得市场机会方面受到限制。
正因为上海从体系上对小企业存在歧视,上海的私营企业从未得到过发展壮大的时间、机会或是财力支持。仅有的一些例外也是因受贿腐败才迅速扩张。
尽管在二十世纪初期上海拥有创办一些在当时中国和亚洲最大企业丰富的历史记录,今天上海私营企业在雇员方面的平均规模之小全国倒数,销售额亦是如此。
上海有着高科技中心的形象,但在上海的私营企业从一般水平上看很少有可能持有专利,或者说持有的专利要比相当农业化又贫穷的内陆云南省的私营企业更少。
个体企业的固定资产投资在1985年达到巅峰,九十年代后半期开始倒塌。正如现任上海市委书记俞正声所指出的,这种创业缺失的现象完全是人为政策的产物。
俞正声叙述了因上海商业环境之差在九十年代末中国最为成功的互联网企业之一阿里巴巴从上海被赶到浙江的往事。
上海本应该在创业上呈现繁荣的景象,除了历史传统的因素,上海还有其他诸多大的优势。
上海有丰富的人力资本。经济快速发展,吸引大量外国直接投资的涌入;上海还有经济学家们认为对经济和商业发展能起到重要作用的集聚辐射型经济。
上海人享有天生具有敏锐商业触觉的美誉。他们有着一种令人相当乐见的特别符合企业家的特质,在中国这就是令人津津乐道的“平民(民间)智慧”。
注:请继续关注第二部分:上海模式有必要加以纠正 :)
【原文】Despite its reputation as a global business center, Shanghai's entrepreneurs have a tough time. Yasheng Huang — MIT professor and author of "Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics" — explores the circumstances of a city where policies tend to discriminate against small firms.
In 1992, a book with the title Shanghai: Her Character Is Her Destiny became a best-seller in China. The Shanghai government sponsored the book project — its preface was written by Mayor Wang Daohan — to research the identity of the city.
Its principal theme was Shanghai's distinct culture, which is characterized by “its great tolerance, diversity, individuality and entrepreneurship.” The book goes on to assert that the renaissance of Shanghai owed much to this distinct cultural heritage.
The claim that Shanghai is historically entrepreneurial is accurate. In the first three decades of the 20th century, Shanghai was the major business and financial hub of Asia — similar to or even more significant than the role of Hong Kong today.
It was the home of the country’s largest textile firms and banks, as well as the founding venue of a number of firms that are still major multinational corporations in the world today. These include Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and the now much-tarnished American International Group (AIG).
A powerful illustration of Shanghai’s rich entrepreneurial heritage is the near-absolute dominance of the Hong Kong economy by industrialists who left Shanghai in 1949.
During the take-off period of Hong Kong, Hong Kong's most important industry was textiles. As recently as 1977, that one industry produced 47% of the value of its exports and employed 45% of its workers.
In the late 1970s, Shanghai industrialists owned 25 cotton-spinning mills in Hong Kong out of a total of 30. Between 1947 and 1959, Shanghai industrialists created 20 out of the 21 cotton-spinning mills established that decade. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Hong Kong miracle was a Shanghai miracle in disguise.
Today, Shanghai cannot claim any large-scale, well-known private-sector businesses. In addition, the city is at the bottom of the country in terms of entrepreneurial measures.
These two phenomena are closely linked with each other — and they are a self-fulfilling prophecy created by Shanghai's industrial policy approach toward economic development.
Industrial policy always favors big, incumbent firms — and in Shanghai, not only are large firms subsidized, but small entrepreneurial businesses are restricted in terms of their access to market opportunities.
Because Shanghai systematically discriminates against small firms, Shanghai’s private sector never had the time, opportunities or resources to grow from small to big. The only exceptions are a few cases where private businesses got big very quickly through corruption.
Despite a rich history of creating some of the largest businesses in China and in Asia in the first part of the 20th century, the average size of Shanghai private-sector firms is among the smallest in China by employment — and is on the small side in terms of sales.
Despite the image of the city as a high-tech hub, the private-sector firms in Shanghai, on average, are less likely to hold patents and/or hold fewer patents than private-sector firms based in the heavily agricultural and poor interior province of Yunnan.
Fixed-asset investments by self-employed household businesses, after reaching a peak in 1985, collapsed in the second half of the 1990s. The missing-entrepreneurship phenomenon is completely an artifact of policy, as Yu Zhensheng, the current Party secretary of Shanghai, pointed out.
Yu recounted how the poor business environment of Shanghai drove out Alibaba — one of the most successful Internet entrepreneurial businesses in China — to Zhejiang province in the late 1990s.
Shanghai should have thrived in entrepreneurship. It has history on its side, but it also has other huge advantages.
It has a rich endowment of human capital. Its economic growth has been rapid, and it has attracted a large influx of FDI. It also has the kind of agglomeration economics that economists believe to be important for economic and business development.
The anecdotal “folk wisdom” in China is that people in Shanghai satisfy one particular definitional feature of entrepreneurs very well. The reputation of Shanghainese is that they are well-endowed with business acumen.
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