【2010.8.21 多伦多《星报》】China’s unfinished economic revolution

rhapsody

http://www.thestar.com/business/ ... economic-revolution

This week’s revelation that China has overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy was anti-climatic. With China growing at about 10 per cent a year for the past 30 years or so, and Japan entering its third decade of stagnant growth, the change in status quo has been long expected.

Still, the milestone sparked predictable hand-wringing in many quarters. Will it be 20 or just 10 years before the Middle Kingdom also surpasses the U.S. in size? Will Beijing eclipse Washington as the corporate colonizer of Latin America, the Middle East, Indonesia and other less-developed nations?

“While the 19th was the European century and the 20th the American century, the world seems to have entered what may become known as the Chinese era,” says Jean-Pierre Lehmann, professor of international political economy at IMD, the distinguished Swiss business school.

But one has to be careful in forecasting superpower status. In the 19th century, it seemed that Russia, Brazil and Argentina were poised for economic greatness. Impressed with Canada’s rapid growth that century, Benjamin Disraeli predicted Canada’s emergence as “the new Russia.”

China itself was once by far the world’s biggest economy. As late as 1820, it accounted for one-third of global GDP. But from the 1840s until a few years after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China languished for some 130 years as the world’s largest irrelevant nation. It was hobbled by bureaucratic corruption and routinely savaged by marauding outsiders, the Opium Wars being only the best-known example to Westerners.

There’s no question that China’s second blossoming is vastly different. Its liberalizing economic reforms of 1979 unleashed an industrial revolution of unprecedented speed and global impact.

China today is the Western world’s workshop. Low-cost Chinese goods on sale at Wal-Mart have kept inflation in check and lowered the cost of living from Mississauga to Manchester.

China this year became the world’s biggest exporter, overtaking Germany; and the world’s biggest consumer of energy, displacing the U.S. China is now the world’s largest car maker, turning out more vehicles than the U.S. and Japan combined.

But the question isn’t whether this spectacular growth is sustainable. It isn’t. Trees don’t grow to the sky, and economies don’t grow at 10 per cent a year indefinitely.

China already leads the world in raw-material imports, whose supply isn’t growing at anything like 10 per cent a year. Unless it means to eventually buy and depopulate, say, resource-rich Canada or Australia, China will have to curb its economic growth rate.

The real question is how will China scale back to a sustainable GDP growth rate of about 5 per cent without triggering social unrest.

Roughly the size of Canada and covering the world’s fourth-largest land mass, China is an amalgam of ethnicities held together by the promise of continued rapid growth and ever-rising prosperity.

Gwynne Dyer, the veteran geopolitics student, sees a constraint in growth to prevent an overheating of the Chinese economy as a dangerous gamble for Beijing. “It may threaten the regime’s survival, since its popularity (if that’s the right word) depends almost entirely on its record in delivering the economic goods.”

When the Great Recession crimped Chinese exports to the West, peasants newly arrived at Chinese coastal factories rioted. Strikes are becoming routine across China, notes Manpower, the recruitment firm, which has about 400 offices in the country.

But as Beijing has given in to demands for higher wages in order to maintain social order, China’s labour-cost advantage has eroded in favour of Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and other lower-wage nations.

Japan has yet to recover from the early 1990s implosion of a property and stock-market bubble that followed its “economic miracle” of 30 years’ duration. Which should give pause to China watchers.

After China’s own three decades of unrestrained growth, house prices over the past year in 36 big Chinese cities have jumped 40 per cent. Prices spiked even higher in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Those skyrocketing prices are cause for widespread public resentment. China is, after all, still a poor nation. Its per capita income is on par with that of El Salvador and Albania, at just $3,600 (U.S.). By contrast, the 2008 standard of living in Japan, Canada and the U.S. was $28,183 (U.S.), $31,639 (U.S.) and $38,008 (U.S.), respectively.

China’s conformist society still lacks innovation. More than 80 per cent of important patents still come out of Europe and the U.S. And China now leads the world in CO2 emissions. The OECD warns that by 2020, pollution in China will cause 600,000 premature deaths a year in China’s cities.

A sustainably prosperous China will need to evolve its export-driven economy into a more highly developed domestic one. The trillions of dollars poured into eight-lane highways will have to be redirected into Western-standard schools and a decent social safety net. China’s state-subsidized health and jobless benefits are exceptionally modest, providing no backstop if the nation’s economic miracle stalls out, as Japan’s did.

Assessing his country’s structural economic woes, Yu Yongding, formerly an official at China’s central bank, allowed that they include “over-dependence on investment and external demand, an unacceptably wide gap in incomes, too few social goods, and an underdevelopment of the service sector. Slow progress in anti-corruption campaigns and institutional reforms are also worrying.”

This is hardly an argument for downplaying what China has accomplished in short order since Mao’s passing from the scene. It’s to suggest that Beijing’s singular focus on GDP growth must give way to creating a domestic social economy to match China’s undeniable, and once unthinkable, prowess at supplying the world with high-quality, low-cost goods.

A deliberate pullback to a more sustainable 5 or 6 per cent annual GDP growth rate currently seems unthinkably risky to Beijing’s central economic planners. Not for them the financial panics that characterized America’s comparatively volatile industrial revolution from the end of the Civil War through to the Great Depression.

Yet the greatest validation of the widely discredited concept of state central planning would be a relatively seamless Chinese transition to a society more reliant on technological breakthroughs than cheap labour. And a flourishing local economy, greatly reducing China’s dependence on foreign markets.

The modern China already has made giant strides few would have predicted even a decade ago. Yes, it remains a work in progress. (So is a periodically hapless Wall Street.) But a Confucian adage describes China’s enviable opportunities: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”

紫色米粒

求翻译。。

m122320056