本帖最后由 青蛙小王子 于 2010-7-7 17:04 编辑
If it wasn't so utterly predictable one would have to admire the symmetry. Having resisted pressure to make their child behave better, the parents of the errant offspring suddenly announce a week before the annual meeting of parents and teachers that they will fall into line. There is relief all round and, indeed, the child does do as the authorities and other parents want. Once the PTA meeting is over, however, the old game resumes. That looks rather like China's currency policy. Last week, the central bank in Beijing announced a "flexible" regime for the yuan with a currency basket in place of the peg to the dollar. The shift took place a week before the G20 summit, with the evident aim of sparing the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, from criticism at that meeting. Though the Obama administration wants more, it saw the move as a valuable first step. The yuan duly rose on Monday, faltered a little in the next two days and then hit a new high on Thursday – just as the world leaders were heading for Canada. Diplomatic mission accomplished, it seemed. Well, no. On Capitol Hill, legislators pressing for punitive duties on Chinese goods if Beijing does not undertake a serious currency appreciation continued to growl. Paul Krugman has opined about the "yuan run-around".
In Beijing, meanwhile, the authorities made it clear that they would move slowly and the central bank reminded anybody who bothered to read its lengthy document that flexibility meant the currency could do down as well as up.
On the other side of the world, the weakness of the euro posed another problem – the yuan has appreciated by some 18% against the common currency this year, threatening the export competitiveness of Chinese products in its biggest overseas market. Having argued for the past 18 months that the west lacks a coherent China policy and that Beijing was unlikely to undertake the increase in the value of its currency urged by successive US administrations, I may be accused of sticking to my guns while Hu Jintao and company embark on a new, less mercantilist, policy and ride to the rescue of western economies. The basic reason why I continue to think this unlikely is simple – China's own problems, which are considerably underestimated in the US and Europe.
We have become accustomed to the portrait of the People's Republic as the gorilla sitting in the global drawing room waiting to eat up every other nation's lunch. We have been fed straight-line forecasts showing how it will overtake the US economically some time in the next decade to dominate the world.
It is, we know, buying up huge tracts of raw materials in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. It holds some $2.4tn in foreign reserves. It bankrolls the US federal deficit and has become a vital link in the worldwide manufacturing and supply chain for Japanese companies as well as those in the west that depend on its low-cost factories for assembly of their goods (and which would be hit by a yuan appreciation, of course). So it may seem perverse to argue that the leadership in Beijing is worried right now. But worried it is – to the point at which China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, says his country "will make sure it maintains a sense of crisis". The China bulls might look at that sentence and wonder what Wen is talking about. Even if growth drops in the second half of this year it will still be at 8% or above. After a dip in April, the trade surplus ballooned again in May.
The worry is that after three decades of amazing growth, China's model forged in the 1980s is running out time. The new leaders who will take over from Hu and prime minister Wen Jiabao in 2012 have shown awareness of that in a recently circulated internal document. Their roadmap to 2022, when there will be another leadership change, is sensible and would raise China to an economic level somewhere around that of the US. But if the destinations are clear, the road to them is filled with potholes. Short term, say to 2012, Beijing faces a tricky task of combining tightening with expansion. It needs to mop up the flood of liquidity and slow down the hectic rise in property prices.
It has to bring the economy back from the runaway 12% growth reported early this year to a sustainable level of around 8% which would create sufficient jobs, keep the population happy and underpin the Communist party's claim to be the only force that can ensure material progress. It needs to rein-in industries whose excess output adds to the perennial problem of over-capacity, but without creating mass unemployment. It needs to guard against inflation and boost wages. Longer term, the challenges that have appeared over the last three decades get even more challenging – widening wealth disparities, air, land and water pollution, corruption,. land rights, labour movement, backward capital markets, freedom of expression, the relationship between Beijing and the provinces. Three decades on, China needs a new shake-up on the scale of that initiated by Deng.
In those circumstances, the probability of seeing Hu and Wen agreeing to a significant appreciation of the currency which would hit exports and do little or nothing to address their longer-term concerns remains, to my mind, minimal. Wen has made it clear that China remains a fan of stimulus packages. The prospect of belt-tightening in a continent that accounts for 20% of Chinese trade is not one to warm his heart.
China is engaged in a long-term strategy to achieve what Hu has defined as a "moderately prosperous nation". With its currency statement, China has shown a readiness to engage in political shadow play. But it will continue to pursue that long-term objective, aware of how far it has gone but also of how much remains to be done.
Western policymakers need to take that far more into account than they appear to do as they fight the fires of low growth, debt, banking weaknesses and volatile electorates.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/26/china-economy |
狗仔卡
发表于 2010-6-28 13:01
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楼主
发表于 2010-6-30 15:49
