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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1865821,00.html
Wanted: A New Miracle
By BILL POWELL / SHANGHAI
Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008
Wang Shaobi was just 7 years old, growing up dirt poor in southeast China, when the world she would inherit changed forever. It was 30 years ago this month — December, 1978 — when China's leadership decided the time had come for their country to open up its economy and to embrace something akin to capitalism. The monumental shift — China under Mao Zedong had been a centrally planned economic disaster — reflected the growing, behind-the-scenes influence of a man few in the West had then heard of: Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. China, the ruling Communist Party decreed back then, "required great growth in the productive forces." And Deng was smart enough to know that that could come in only one way. China would get on the road to capitalism.
Today, Wang, who has chosen a Western name, Colleen, works in a gleaming office tower in the manufacturing center of Guangzhou in southern China. At age 37, she is the very image of a polished chief executive officer, right down to her Milano briefcase. Wang is the founder of an advertising agency that employs nearly 70 people in three Chinese cities and counts as customers major multinational companies including Procter & Gamble and Sony Ericsson. Like so many of her generation, Wang never looked back after racing through the door Deng's economic reforms opened, and her accomplishments show how far the country has come. But they also show that China's capitalist road is leading toward a wall — that the first phase of its 30-year economic miracle has run its course.
Every day now at the Guangzhou train station, just a few miles away from Wang's office, hundreds of migrant workers wait to start the long journey back to their home provinces. They have been laid off from jobs working in toy and textile factories, and from construction sites throughout what used to be a booming province. Among them is Zhang Dingli, 36, who worked in a toy factory for a decade. But in early November, the plant closed. He is a victim of an economic transition — a move away from the low-end, low-wage, export-oriented manufacturing on which much of China's rapid growth was built — that has been made more urgent by the global economic crisis. As China's double-digit growth rate plummets, thousands of factories are being shut down and millions of workers are being thrown onto the streets. They will need jobs in the years to come, and the Chinese government is scrambling for an answer to Zhang's plaintive question as he prepares to return to his native Sichuan province: "What am I going to do after I get home?"
China needs a new economic miracle — and the trajectory of the global economy may depend on whether one can be conjured up. China, theoretically, should be one of the locomotives that will eventually help pull the world out of its slump. That won't happen overnight; overhauling the world's fourth largest economy is going to take some time. For the moment, to tread water, Beijing is frantically throwing money at infrastructure projects, much as U.S. President-elect Barack Obama now promises to do in America. But ditch-digging on a national scale, Beijing knows, will not take China where it needs to go. Only if leaders execute a series of complex alterations to the foundations of its economic growth will China maintain its momentum. "The [global slump] is absolutely accelerating the fundamental changes that were already taking place," says Daniel Rosen, a principal at the Rhodium Group, a New York City – based economic-consulting firm. "The Chinese may have understandably felt entitled to relax a bit after 30 years of wrenching change. Unfortunately, they can't."
Turning Savers into Spenders the goal for china's transition sounds straightforward enough. "We've become a big economy," says Wang Zhenzhong, an adviser to the Chinese government and director of the economic-research institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). "Now, we need to become a strong economy." In a nutshell, this means becoming a bit more like Japan by developing domestic, technologically formidable manufacturers, rather than just making a lot of inexpensive stuff for the rest of the world. It also means becoming a bit more like the U.S., where factory jobs have over the years been supplanted by the growth of the service sector and knowledge-based companies. China's need to emulate America may seem counterintuitive at the moment, given the parlous state of the U.S. economy. But it is precisely because tapped-out American consumers have stopped buying Chinese-made goods that this economic rebalancing act needs to proceed with haste. The country's factories need new customers. Chinese consumers can fill that void, by spending more and reducing their stratospherically high national household-savings rate, which stands at more than 25%, compared with a savings rate in the U.S. that hovers near zero. China needs to start creating new jobs by boosting its underdeveloped service sector, which contributes just 40% to overall GDP, compared with 79% in the U.S. In that way, the country can reduce its dependence on exports and continue to grow, thereby increasing its role as an outlet for the goods and services produced by the rest of the world.
Can technocrats in Beijing pull this off? The country has an advantage: it has not yet leveraged its enormous domestic market. The service sector has huge potential. Consider entrepreneurs like Colleen Wang. Instead of employing low-wage metal benders, Wang's ad agency, Rayken, provides jobs for young, middle-class professionals: graphic designers, art directors, a couple of account executives and several copywriters.
This is unremarkable, of course. It's what advertising agencies do. What is remarkable is how few Chinese companies like Rayken exist. China's service industry is shockingly underdeveloped for an economy that will likely be the world's largest by 2050. In a country of 1.3 billion people, only about 5 million work in health care, just 2 million in jobs related to the environment and conservation, and only 4 million in banking and insurance.
This needs to change — and it has started to. Beijing's plans to increase the service sector's overall contribution to the economy by 3 percentage points by 2010 — to 43% of GDP — and by 10 points a decade from now. Earlier this year, the government ordered state-owned banks to step up lending to service-sector companies. Beijing has also begun to break down barriers that have prevented foreign companies from investing in highly regulated areas of the economy. Health care, which should generate an enormous number of jobs going forward as China's population ages rapidly, is one example. Taiwanese companies have already invested in 14 hospitals across the country — and see that as only the beginning. Says Michael Tseng, an executive at Taiwan's BenQ Corp., which runs a hospital in Nanjing: "China was the world's factory, but manufacturing is yesterday's story now."
How quickly a new story can be written may depend largely upon the Chinese people becoming a whole lot better at consuming more and saving less. But, while the authoritarian government continues to pull the strings in many parts of society, Beijing cannot simply order citizens to buy Gucci for the good of the country and the world. Chinese save much of what they earn because the government has yet to provide the web of social services available in other countries. China's national social security system and government health-insurance schemes are drastically underfunded, and moreover don't cover the millions of migrant workers who helped power the country to high growth but are now being laid off. The lack of safety nets demands frugality, as does Chinese cultural tradition that all but dictates that working children care for their parents as they age. Even ad-agency chief Wang takes care of her parents. This requires Chinese to accumulate very large nest eggs, particularly because China's longstanding one-child policy means there is often just one offspring caring for two parents.
The government is committed to freeing up discretionary spending. Earlier this year, Beijing vowed to double the size of the national social security fund, to $147 billion by 2010, and to steadily increase it from there. "This," says CASS economist Wang, "is like turning around an ocean liner. But at least we've started to turn."
A High-Tech Solution To economic policymakers, the real meaning of becoming a strong economy lies beyond getting citizens to spend more and expanding the service industry. The next Chinese miracle, at root, will mean becoming a first-rate technological power. China's road ahead was on display earlier this month in Shanghai, when a San Francisco – based company called the Cleantech Group hosted a venture-capital forum aimed at driving investment dollars toward alternative-energy entrepreneurs on the mainland. Opportunities appear to be plentiful, despite the dim economic environment. Forum attendee Patrick Tam, CEO of Beijing Tsing Capital, says he is investing heavily in Chinese clean-tech companies — most recently in a Beijing firm called NetPower Technologies, which makes a battery that helps power-hungry businesses reduce their electricity consumption. "The government is just letting the venture-capital market rip in this field," says Tam. "It's exactly what needs to happen to develop new technologies and new jobs in China. I think in a lot of ways this is our future."
It's a compelling vision: China as a high-tech powerhouse. But making it come true will take years, and there are major obstacles. Idea theft is the biggest. Though the country has made progress in strengthening intellectual-property rights over the past several years, rampant piracy of software, music and other IP remains a huge issue. "People with the ideas have to be protected," says Rosen, the New York City economic consultant. "They've moved on this because they know without it a high-tech China remains a dream."
The next miracle, in other words, may be harder to pull off than the last one. That doesn't mean it won't happen. Consider what, in 1978, constituted a "rich" eligible bachelor in urban China. He had to own a radio; he had to be able to buy his bride a fashionable wristwatch made by a state-owned company no one would ever confuse with Rolex. And he had to commute on the coolest set of wheels available: a bicycle called the Phoenix.
In just three decades, China remade its world. For all the challenges the country now faces, is it wise to bet against it happening again?
边翻译边贴，未完待续。
王少碧（音）生长在中国东南部的贫苦家庭。她7岁的时候，也就是30年前，中国开始实行改革。当时是1978年12月份，中国领导人觉得该是实行对外开放的时候了。毛泽东领导下的中国经历了中央计划经济的灾难，改革开放不朽的转变反映了发展和一个人的潜在影响：他就是西方很少听说的副总理邓小平。共产党领导的中国当时宣布“大力发展生产力”。聪明的邓小平知道中国会走向一条道路-资本主义。
如今，给自己起了科琳(Coleen)这个英文名的王女士已经成为一名有身份的女总裁。37岁的她是一家广告公司的创始人，在三个城市雇佣了70个员工，其公司客户很多都是跨国大公司。同许多同代人一样，王女士随着中国的经济改革步伐勇往直前，义无返顾。她所取得的成就也表明了中国变化之巨大。但同时也表明了中国的资本主义道路正通往一堵墙--第一个30年的经济奇迹已经完毕。
现在，在离王女士办公楼仅几英里远的广州火车站，每天都有大批农民工等待长途跋涉返回家乡。其中一个是36岁的张定力（音），他在一家玩具厂工作了10年，但11月初工厂倒闭了。他是经济转型的牺牲品之一。低端，低薪和面向出口的加工一度给中国带来快速增长的经济，现在全球经济危机中变得更紧急。当中国两位数的增长率骤降，几千家工厂被迫关闭，百万工人被扔到街上。他们需要工作，前往老家四川的张定力哀怨的问：“回到家乡我该怎么办？”中国政府正仓促地寻求问题的答案。
[ 本帖最后由 rlsrls08 于 2008-12-19 22:24 编辑 ] |
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发表于 2008-12-19 20:55
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