不才當年也曾認真想過做翻譯的，以下是10年前譯的習作。
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中國：一往無前
停工的廠房、閑置的貨輪、四處蔓延的破產風潮、大規模的返鄉民工以及城市中久違的幹淨空氣——經濟蕭條的景象已經遍布中國的大小角落。當世界各國無力進口大量的“中國製造”時，中國將承受遠比其它國家更嚴重的打擊——就像美國在19世紀二十年代的大蕭條時遇到的情況一樣，那時，美國就是所謂的“世界工廠”。同樣，也像當時的美國那樣，中國將利用這艱難時期來進行產業升級，以期獲得過去幾十年間美國人一直占據的高利潤、高附加值的工作。這對美國來說顯然是個相當糟糕的消息，除非她也能夠在這艱難時局中重塑自身。
——詹姆士·法羅斯(James Fallows)
一
我們在北京的公寓剛好俯視這個城市的長途汽車站，人們經此從鄉村來到城市打工或做小買賣，也從這裏離開返回家鄉。去年夏天，這裏人潮洶湧，大部分都是離開城市的人群。
當時，中國正竭盡全力將北京裝扮一新來迎接奧運，大量民工返鄉也被視為這努力的一部分。此前，建築工人一直在各個工地上拚命地趕工，力爭在奧運前完成一些大規模的公共工程(比如新的地鐵站)。即使是那些注定無法及時完工的工程，工人們也在工地上忙碌著，他們或者要把四處亂堆的建材收拾整齊，或者要用大板子把整個工地圍起來，省得有礙觀瞻。到了七月，為了保證奧運的安全，也為了淨化空氣，政府通令北京附近的所有工地全部停工。工人們，大部分是鄰近較貧困省份來的農民工，離開了北京回到家鄉，與親人們在電視上一同感受奧運（多數人並沒有領到工錢）。
九月，隨著奧運遊客的離開，民工們擁擠在長途車和火車中又紛紛回到了北京。就像在中國其它所有飛速發展的城市中一樣，民工們在北京總是很紮眼。他們的臉頰和雙手布滿了皺紋，衣服也更簡單更破舊。通常情況下，他們大多會扛著一個裝有被褥和簡單物件的大花格子尼龍編織袋，笨拙而艱辛地在各個城市間遊移。值得一提的是，這種袋子已經在全世界貧窮國家中普及，成為移民工人的一種標準配備。
奧運後民工向北京回流在我們的意料之中，但接下來的事情誰都沒想到。10月中旬，大約就在美國零售業麵臨崩潰時，我們漸漸發現大客車再次加班加點兒地運送著整車整車的民工們離開這座城市。11月的某個寒冷的下午，當路過一個寫字樓的工地時，我發現那裏的起重機已經停止了工作。僅僅一個星期前，這些起重機還一直在吊著水泥和鋼筋在人們頭頂上晃悠，嚇的路過的行人直貓腰。工地前停著一排掛河北車牌的大客車。“現在都沒活兒了”，一位客車司機跟我說，他們正準備把工人們都拉回老家去，拉完這一撥馬上還要返回來再拉下一撥。
可能是因為今年春天的風比往年多些，也可能是因為奧運期間下重手整治環境的餘威猶存，開春兒前後，北京的空氣明顯比去年這個時候要幹淨很多。但是，改善的空氣質量也是北京工廠減少的一個標誌。許多設在城市的上風處的重型工業企業停產，市內的空氣當然變得幹淨。
離去的大巴和潔淨的空氣，這是這次全球金融危機的經濟衰退在本地的體現。類似的衰退跡象已經在中國隨處可見：大量集裝箱貨輪滯留在香港碼頭沒有生意可接；澳門賭場的收入一落千丈；北京上海之間的來回航班旅客連架小飛機都塞不滿。(2006年我第一次從北京去上海時，一架波音747擠得滿滿登登。)報上說今年還有超過一百萬的大學畢業生找不到工作；房地產開發商和工廠企業主破產後迅速人間蒸發，留下的一堆爛攤子，受損民眾的抗議風潮席卷全國；短短幾個月內，位於香港以北的廣東東莞就有數千家工廠倒閉。曾幾何時，那裏還是所謂“中國製造”的樣板——廉價的勞工生產廉價的產品，數不清的玩具和小飾品從這個小地方走向全世界。
盡管在中國統計數據都不大靠譜，但一月份的時候我從東莞當地一個官員那裏得到數據還值得一聽，他說他們那塊兒方圓十五裏之內至少有一百萬工人剛剛丟了工作，臨近的地區少說也還有一百萬失業大軍。在深圳，擁有25萬雇員的大型電子企業富士康公司去年年底也被迫給員工放了一個月的無薪假，中國媒體報道說，該公司可能將要在全球範圍內裁員10萬人。
二
過去的三十年，中國，在一個集權政府的統領之下，社會現代化和經濟繁榮一刻也沒有停止過前進的步伐，“發展”使一切危機與不滿消於無形，這簡直就像一個神話。現在，“神話”終結了嗎？中國的發展模式是否已發揮至極限，各種隱藏的矛盾已到了噴發的時候？如果中國不能保持發展，它會四分五裂嗎？
對於中國經濟目前遇到的問題，海外的觀察家們很喜歡跟80年代的日本做比較。最近幾個月，我聽到數不清的老美和一些歐洲人說，“這不是就是當年的小日本嗎？”他們的意思是說，20年前日本的發展也是來勢洶洶、不可阻擋，但隨後就變成了個“東亞經濟病夫”。崛起的中國也會走上這條老路嗎？有意思的是，在中國國內，很少有人將中國與日本做類比，因為兩者實在差別太大：中國是一個在工業化道路上緊追猛趕的大貧農，而日本是已經實現工業化一百多年的小中產了。
據我所知，中國的知識分子和官員經常拿出蘇聯的例子來說事兒，以史為鑒，認為經濟發展的失敗必將導致政權崩潰、國土分裂。照此邏輯，中國共產黨除了拚命發展經濟之外別無選擇，那是它政權合法性的真實來源。經濟一旦停滯(公認的警戒線是年增長率8%)，老百姓們就會將不滿的的矛頭直指共產黨，那後果簡直不堪設想。看看當年龐大的蘇聯和今天如同縮了水一樣的俄羅斯，我們就不難理解，為什麽中國在對待西藏、新疆和台灣問題時會有那樣毫不退讓、決不妥協的死硬態度。
無論是日本還是俄羅斯，拿來跟中國做比較研究都很別扭。拿蘇聯跟中國比有些高看蘇聯了，曆史上它從未實現過中國這般的高速經濟發展。實際上，長達幾十年實打實的經濟衰退讓蘇維埃大廈轟然倒塌。如果拿日本來比，中國似乎還比不上。日本盡管經曆了“失去的十年”，它仍然是大多數國家羨慕的對象。雖然國民隻有美國的一半、中國的十分之一，日本確是世界第二大經濟強國，擁有眾多的知名工業品牌，其中包括世界第一大汽車製造商——“豐田”。另外，日本和蘇聯在曆史的不同時期都曾扮演過現代化榜樣的角色，令其他國家紛紛效仿。當代的中國是一種勢力、一個現實，但不是一個別國可以簡單複製的榜樣或意識形態。從曆史到未來，中國模式自始至終都是獨一無二的。(發展規模與中國不相上下的印度，政治製度卻大相徑庭。實際上，世界上沒有任何其他的國家能夠一邊飛速建造現代化的公路、機場和工業園區的同時又能保持一個高壓的政治製度。)
話說回來，他山之石可以攻玉，借鑒一下以上兩個國家的經曆來預測一下中國的未來多少也有點兒理性基礎。蘇聯的政權是被經濟上的失敗而毀滅，這沒什麽好說的。日本經濟也有很大的問題，其金融市場下跌了近二十年而不能調整，這多少也說明日本人的係統固步自封，不能適應變化的世界。如果中國不被近年來如環境汙染、水危機、腐敗、貧富分化和安全生產(煤礦事故導致平均每天死亡250多人)一類的問題搞垮的話，它會更像誰呢？經濟增長減速導致矛盾激增，隨後像蘇聯一樣亡黨亡國？還是像日本一樣，陷入一個長達二十年經濟停滯的泥潭且無法自拔？
我大膽預測一下——都不會！中國經曆了史無前例的飛速現代化，目前又遇到了許多大麻煩，貌似發展已到了一個頂點，是物極必反的時候了。確實有這種可能，當我們回望那輝煌燦爛的北京奧運開幕式時會感歎，那恰恰是是我們這些老外最後一次相信中國無所不能的時刻。但也另有一種可能，中國可以突破極限，一往無前，讓整個世界瞠目結舌。我賭後者！
三
首先，我們來考慮一下，在最糟糕的情況下，中國會變成什麽樣子以及這種變化對世界的影響。常駐北京的金融學教授麥克·佩迪斯(Michael Pettis)對此問題看得最清楚。“一句話，中國現在的情況就像是上個世紀20年代的美國”，他說。
美國20世紀初在世界經濟中扮演的角色與近些年的中國驚人地相似。一直到一戰開始時，美國還一直是個“淨債務”國。它是依靠外國借貸和投資建造起來的工廠、鐵路才將自身鍛造成一個工業巨人。第一次世界大戰時，美國工業一方麵源源不斷的向歐洲提供戰略物資，另一方麵在世界範圍內搶走了不少本屬於歐洲公司的市場，以致於到戰爭結束時，它已經搖身一變成了“淨債權”國。
20世紀20年代，美國依靠它的工農業成為真正的“世界工廠”，與絕大多數國家保持貿易盈餘。這也意味著，當時的美國生產和消費已經失衡，它超比例地獲得了世界上大部分的工作，而它生產的大部分產品是供外國人使用而非本國消費。為支付貿易赤字，當時各個國家要麽就是向美國大量輸出黃金，要麽就是向美國借債或引進美國投資。經濟學家約翰·凱恩斯當年曾刻薄地說到，美國已經把全世界的金子都拉他們自己家去藏起來了。
這一切看起來有點兒眼熟，不錯，正是跟今天中國幹的一模一樣。當時看來，這麽一直幹下去，日子過得還不錯。
然而，全球產品淨出口國的身份讓美國在30年代的經濟蕭條中吃盡了苦頭。當全球總需求下降時，美國當初超比例的工作份額換來的是30年代超高的失業率。這倒並不是說美國人在大蕭條中比歐洲人更痛苦，因為我們有羅斯福，而他們隻有希特勒、斯大林、佛朗哥和墨索裏尼，但僅從經濟事實角度考量，美國當時確實麵對全球最嚴重的裁員風潮和最高的失業率。
這就說到今日中國所麵臨的問題了。很多美國人錯誤地認為，中國多年來的貿易盈餘將令它在經濟衰退中不至於搞得太難看。長遠來講，這兩萬億外匯儲備確實有防身之效，但短期來看，中國嚴重依賴外國消費的弱點將令它備受打擊，外匯儲備也救不了急。
通過統計對比“過度生產指標”（根據僅為外國消費而進行生產的工廠和工人數算出），佩迪斯最近寫文章稱，中國目前的世界貿易盈餘至少與1929年時的美國一樣大，各占世界當時經濟總產值的0.5%。但如果計算兩國各自的國內經濟總產值，中國的相對盈餘則要大得多，從比例上來講，中國目前對外國消費製造就業的依賴5倍於1929年的美國。除非中國能想辦法消化這部分因外國消費需求減少而帶來的生產過剩，它必將麵臨嚴重的失業打擊。
根據當年大蕭條的經驗，佩迪斯說，中國很有可能會繼續努力向世界輸出產品。
美國當年也是想這麽做。當年美國股市崩盤、經濟崩潰、貿易盈餘陡然消失，美國企業界為保住市場和工作在絕望中病急亂投醫，遊說國會通過了那臭名昭著的《斯姆特－霍利關稅法》，向多達2萬種美國進口商品加征關稅。很快，各國紛紛報複，世界貿易迅速縮水，大蕭條自此正式開始。今天，人們已普遍將《斯姆特－霍利關稅法》看作是一個慘痛的教訓：任何幹預貿易的行為，尤其是美國幹預貿易的行為，其結果很可能是災難性的。
佩迪斯還特別指出，《斯姆特－霍利關稅法》帶來的政治傷害比它的經濟意義更大。美國當年想保護它的貿易盈餘和工作機會，其他國家其實心知肚明，但這種手段太赤裸裸了，從政治上講，其它國家必須反擊，別無選擇。因為有這個教訓，如果蕭條再次來襲，不管媒體上“保護主義”的口號叫得多凶，美國都不太可能重新走上保護主義的不歸路。
值得擔心的是，中國會不會搞出個有中國特色的《斯姆特－霍利關稅法》來？當然，中國不會大大方方直接推出個類似的關稅法來提高關稅，但它還有很多其它選擇：比如提高出口補貼，比如人為壓低剛剛開始放鬆控製的人民幣幣值，比如鼓勵中國企業降低員工工資，再比如為外國進口人為設置障礙（最近剛取消的波音和空客的大訂單就是個好例子）。實際上，自2009年開始，中國政府采取了以上所有的措施，一個不漏，它的貿易盈餘在世界經濟衰退的大背景下竟然不降反升，而且是大幅攀升。出口的確是下降了，但進口下降地更厲害：一月，中國出口總額下降17個百分點，而進口總額下降了43個百分點，是出口降幅的兩倍。很明顯，中國試圖轉嫁它的失業問題給其它所有國家。這對其它國家來說與其說是個經濟問題，不如說是政治挑釁。照此事態發展下去，一旦觸發各國的貿易報複措施，中國將經曆比美國二十世紀三十年代更糟糕的失業問題。中國挑起一場最終將自身也吞噬掉的貿易大戰，這是任何人也不願意看到的最糟糕的結果。
中國逐漸成為美國的債權國極大地增加了中國對美談判時的籌碼。但是，兩個國家似乎都沒有完全預料到，至少在本輪經濟衰退中，他們成了拴在一條繩子上的螞蚱。今年初，像高西慶這樣了解中國對美投資的中國官員越來越多地明確表示：如果美國人想繼續向中國借錢，它的經濟應該走上正軌才行。簡單來說，它應該多生產、多投資，少借債、少消費。在一月的達沃斯經濟年會上，中國總理溫家寶毫不客氣的指責是美國的揮霍浪費把世界經濟拖進了衰退。
嗬嗬！如果美國接受這些建議的話，中國經濟馬上會變得更糟糕，因為恰恰是美國的過度消費造就了中國製造業的繁榮。
在對別國政策指手畫腳的的水平上，美國方麵也好不到哪裏去。美國既希望中國減少貿易盈餘，又希望中國繼續用貿易中得到的美元來投資美國國債和股票。什麽便宜都被我們美國人占了，這怎麽可能？！中國人要麽借給我們些錢，要麽勻給我們一些工作機會，不可能兩樣都給。
四
不管中國的領導人如何教訓美國人，一個無可改變的事實是，美國經濟危機叢生正在一路探底，中國的企業和工人都在經受沉重的打擊。那為什麽我還認為中國人有理由保持信心呢？
首先，這是算出來了的，是純經濟學的觀點。受賜於大手筆的4萬億人民幣拉動內需計劃，部分喪失的外部需求將在中國國內市場消化。這個刺激經濟計劃從比例上來說要遠高於奧巴馬政府提出的刺激經濟方案，因為中國的經濟規模比美國小得多。當然，對於這4萬億的投資業界還有許多疑問。有些計劃中的項目是早已批準甚至已經開工的，似乎難以算作新的投資；有些項目需要中央和地方合資，而地方政府在經濟衰退中財源吃緊，怕是拿不出這筆配套資金來；資金的分配也是問題，盡管有部分投資是用於建立全民醫療保險的，但大部分的資金投向還是在工程方麵：建高速，修鐵路，蓋飛機場等等。中國政府一遇到問題，第一反應往往就是“搞個工程”（哪怕是提高中國大學素質這類問題，首先想到的也是飛快立項建一批研究中心的大樓）。就像世界上大多數地方一樣，這些大工程往往伴隨著數不清的內幕交易和滿天飛的回扣。但不管怎麽說，抹水泥、吊大梁這種活兒總是要雇傭很多勞力的，尤其是中國這種注重人海戰術的地方，這些工程對那些因工廠倒閉而被迫返鄉的農民工來說是多了些謀生的機會。
從桌子上堆積如山的行業報告中，我發現很多分析都指出，有些行業的複蘇可能比宏觀經濟數據顯示得要來的快得多。“什麽時候中國大陸經濟會出現回暖跡象呢？”裏昂證券的安迪·羅斯曼(Andy Rothman)在一份水泥和鋼鐵業的報告中說，“我們預測是在2009年的四、五月份。”那正是鋼鐵廠和水泥廠接到4萬億投資計劃第一批訂單的時候。
中國房地產價格像美國一樣出現了全麵下滑的情況，但中國的房貸問題與美國的次貸危機不可同日而語。美國的銀行是真沒錢了，而中國的銀行卻還有很多錢，之所以他們收緊信貸是因為此前中國政府最關心的是通貨膨脹的危險。“中國的銀行資產流動性很好，而且他們服從命令聽指揮，黨說要投哪兒就投哪兒，因為所有銀行的高管都是黨指定的。”羅斯曼寫道，黨現在已經開始命令各個銀行大筆花錢了。
我還有很多其他行業的報告，它們都有一個相同的結論：中國經濟也許將遭受最嚴重的打擊，但相較於其它國家，它擁有更多的手段和資源來應對危機。
拋開經濟學方麵的分析不談，“中國要完蛋了”這種假設有一個大前提，那就是“中國民眾目前隻是勉強忍受政府緊抓政治控製而放寬經濟管製的政策，一旦政府不能夠實現它所許諾的共同富裕的前景，人民就會毫不猶豫的開始反抗”。在我看來，這種想法完全無視中國獨特的文化和政治現實，與我實際看到的情況並不一致。
我經常琢磨，為什麽會有那麽多中國人（不論其是何職業背景）都顯得充滿活力、朝氣蓬勃？我想這絕不僅是因為有我“溫吞水”似的個性反襯的原因，而是因為今日的中國就像二十世紀50年代的歐洲，幾乎每家每戶都經曆過巨大痛苦和極度動亂的洗禮，曆經劫難的人們對新生活的希望和信心遠超美國人的想象。去年我采訪過一個山西的官員，他當時正跟我講他的地方發展規劃。每隔10到15分鍾，他就要停下來，通過翻譯問我，“你能理解嗎？如果不是鄧小平，我現在還在牛屁股後麵犁地呢！我不可能像現在這樣西服革履地跟你這樣的老外談話。”或者說，“你能體會這變化有多大嗎？我媽媽她們那會兒還裹小腳呢！”我以前還認識一位北京的學者，他說他的自信心是文革當知青時培養起來的，十幾歲時在兵團戰天鬥地連幹四年也能熬下來，現在還有什麽苦不能吃。現在十幾二十歲的中國年輕人雖然沒插過隊，但他們至少聽說過那些艱苦的故事。
炒魷魚和減薪水？太小兒科了，中國人吃過的苦比這多得多。去年夏天，我和妻子去了四川地震災區，那裏很多村子已經成了一片廢墟，幸存的村民隻能在臨時搭的帳篷裏住上幾年。恰恰這個時候，許多原本在城市打工的村民因為找不到工作或被辭退，被迫回到了鄉村，令這裏的情況雪上加霜。太慘了，是嗎？也許對美國人來說是的。問問當地的老人們，他們會說，這算什麽！想當年“大躍進”的時候，村上有一半人都活活餓死了……
當我和妻子在上世紀80年代第一次踏上中國的土地時，這裏的大多數人還都在眾多龐大、原始且低效的所謂國有企業裏工作。在杭州一家占地一英畝且沒有暖氣的大廠房裏，我見過超過5千名婦女在那裏用原始的織布機生產著根本就沒人想買的簾子和掛毯。90年代鄧小平掀起新一輪改革熱潮後，這些浪費巨大的國有企業很多都被關閉了，短短幾年之內造成了數千萬人的失業(有些大型國企保留了下來，成為電信、航空等行業的巨頭)。當年中國的當代小說幾乎全是講下崗職工的，直到2000年後，當代題材才漸漸變成了民工或城市白領。國企改製造成了很嚴重的社會矛盾，但離導致政府垮台還差得太遠。中國人民經受住了那次危機的考驗，中國政府也一樣。中國人民像其他各地方的人民一樣也有各種生活的需要，他們對生活質量的期望也在逐步提高，但沒有明顯的證據表明，在忍受了如此多的苦難之後，目前的金融危機是中國人不能忍受而必須揭竿而起的。期待中國像蘇聯那樣四分五裂的人暫時可以歇歇了。
與國外媒體裏中國人謹小慎微的形象相反，頭一次來中國的老外可能會驚訝於普通中國人直言不諱的風格。街上如果出了交通事故，肇事雙方往往大吵大嚷，有時還敢對著警察大叫，或是各自向圍觀群眾演講似地細數事故的來龍去脈。工人們說老板是騙子，業主罵物業是混蛋的例子更是比比皆是。在中國西部，我遇到過一些因修水壩而被迫遷居的農民，他們拉著我們在他們的新居裏到處轉，一會兒說這裏有道兒縫兒，一會兒說那裏缺道兒口兒，總之，比他們原來的房子差遠了。大聲的抱怨，這對美國人來說司空見慣，對現在的中國人來說也並不陌生。
但是當人們抱怨時，矛頭指向的都是某些具體的人，是那些卑劣的老板、記者、市長或官僚們，而不是這個社會製度或國家的最高統治者。宏觀上對製度和壓迫的抗議當然也存在，就像去年300多知識分子搞的“08現章”公民自由運動，但那絕對不是常態。10年前，當亞洲金融風暴使中國的失業率超過10%時，抗議浪潮四處蔓延。裏昂證券的安迪·羅斯曼表示，“當時下崗工人們都是在爭取他們的權益，比如被地方官僚克扣的失業補助什麽的，並不是反對中央政府，盡管事實上是中央政府的某些政策真正導致他們丟了工作。”也許是工人們看不了那麽遠，但起碼現在來說，在與地方政府的博弈中，工人們都期望中央政府能夠扮演一個保護者的角色，而不是期望中央垮台。
五
長遠來看，目前的危機未嚐不是中國開啟未來之門的鑰匙。
大約三十年前，正當世界又陷入一場全球性的經濟衰退時，我受大西洋月刊之邀去了矽穀和底特律，采寫一篇比較兩地不同工業發展模式如何應對危機的稿子。我當時采訪過的公司有一些如今還依然聲名顯赫，比如底特律的通用和福特，矽穀的蘋果、英特爾和惠普，但很明顯，大部分我在矽穀采訪過的企業都已經灰飛煙滅、不知所終了（還有人能記得紅極一時的飛鷹電腦或是奧斯博筆記本嗎？）。高新技術產業是近幾十年經濟發展的動力源泉，但如果不是業內人士的話，一般人很難理解這個行業瞬息萬變的發展速度和極度殘酷的競爭環境。身處高新技術產業的科技精英們如今經常強調說，盡管沒人喜歡被淘汰出局，但這種高流動性的競爭環境恰恰是保證美國工業不斷成功不可或缺的一部分。長江後浪推前浪，沒有那麽多老公司被殘酷競爭無情地吃掉，就不會有那麽多新公司雨後春筍般地崛起。
中國眾多中小型企業發展得不錯，令美國都自歎弗如，盡管我們經常高調地把鼓勵發展小公司掛在嘴邊，但這方麵的成績一直乏善可陳。中國這些小企業之間的競爭其實也很強，但始終停留在拚命勒緊褲腰帶節約成本的水平上，這種競爭對中國經濟的整體發展貢獻甚微。在爭先恐後地爭做國外品牌代工工廠的過程中，一分錢掰兩半兒花的這些中國小企業們都越來越擅長精打細算，能夠很靈巧地從本來油水不多的訂單中擠出些利潤來(大頭兒自然都被外國公司拿走了)。然後，目前的危機可不是光靠節約成本就能熬過去的。
我最近走訪了北京、上海、深圳以及中國其他一些城市的企業，觀察到一種趨勢，中國公司正利用目前的發展低潮進入一些全新的領域，嚐試生產高科技、高附加值、高回報的三高產品，這對以前的中國公司來說是很難想象的。當然，對於中國這樣一個國土遼闊、各地千差萬別甚至顯得有些亂糟糟的國家中，你能觀察到任何你想要找到的所謂“趨勢”。但不管怎麽說，短短幾周之內，我發現有些公司不僅沒有衰退，反而有增長。中國公司的領導們正在構思新的發展藍圖，並已經開始向某些方向大筆投資。為什麽不呢？現在正是國外競爭者最虛弱的時候，人力資源和固定資產又正是最便宜的時候。難道，中國又開始為下一輪跳躍式增長做熱身了？
在深圳，我再次訪問了愛爾蘭企業家李艾姆·卡西(Liam Casey)。他是為外國企業找中國代工的一個中間人，對中國企業很了解，兩年前我就采訪過他，並稱他為“中國先生”。他告訴我說，與他經常打交道的中國公司中，但凡能排到前一百名的，沒有一家倒閉。盡管有些也在苦苦掙紮，但很多卻在尋求轉型，不再簡單地做來料加工，而是力求要推出自己的品牌和高附加值產品(有些產品，比如平板電腦、手持GPS等，已經在今年的拉斯維加斯消費電子展上嶄露頭角了)。
在北京的最南端，我采訪了一家由某中國零售業巨頭建立的“零售業研究中心”。像世界其它地方的零售業一樣，中國零售商也在經曆行業的寒冬。但即使沒有全球需求下滑的影響，中國的零售業也已經到了非改變不可的時候。家樂福、沃爾瑪、百思買和宜家這類的高效率的零售巨頭已經進入了中國，中國的消費者能夠明顯地感覺到這些商店與原來蘇聯式百貨商場的不同。傳統的中國零售小店一般都是又黑又髒，大商場還好一些，但效率很差，你往往要排上一隊挑選商品，再排上一隊去交錢，然後拿了發票再排上一隊去拿貨，整個過程令人崩潰。
建立這個“零售業研究中心”的百貨集團CEO曾經去美國一家零售公司參觀訪問過一個星期，回來以後就成了“顧客是上帝”的信徒，隨後重金禮聘了一個美國顧問，建了這家中心。有關商場營銷、商品布置、目標受眾等課題會在這個研究中心裏得到充分的討論和研究。此外他還有建了座“培訓中心”，雇員們在那裏接受國際化高標準的訓練，大到待人接物、小到樓道衛生，訓練內容不一而足。在蕭條的背景下，所有這些努力很可能最後都是白費力氣，但起碼被請來的這位美國顧問不這麽看，他已經把一家老小都接到了北京，因為他相信，中國人確實誠心誠意地想搞出中國自己的家樂福來。
在北京的另一頭兒，一個由政府投資的開發區裏，我參觀了著名的IBM中國研究院。研究院主任湯瑪斯·李(Thomas Li)接待了我。湯瑪斯在台灣長大，父母是大陸過去的外省人。他在美國留學，獲得博士學位後順風順水地進入一家美國公司開始了自己的事業。多年前，胸懷對舊日祖國的複雜情感，他又踏上了父輩們生息的這塊土地追尋自己的成功。2002年，李博士全家移居北京。在這裏，他指揮著一個200多人、主要由中國電腦工程師組成的團隊。在中國的高新技術企業中，像李博士這樣的“海歸”比比皆是。
我參觀了一些研究院研究的新產品，其中有個玩意兒真是太棒了，如果允許的話，我真想當場砸錢把它買下來。那套係統能夠即時把語音變成文字，又把文字翻譯成另一種語言。電腦產業多年來一直想搞出語言與文字互相轉換的東西，但準確性老是有問題，至今都沒有成熟的產品問世。類似的產品演示我以前看過很多，但從未像那天那樣令我震驚。當時在場的人中隻有我和妻子兩人是以英文為母語，但不管其他人口音多重，那個係統都能相當準確地實時將我們說的話轉換成文本。我本來一直有意識地盡量放慢語速，清晰地吐字發音，後來為了測驗一下這套係統真正的本領，我以平常與美國老鄉談話時的口音和語速說了下麵這句：“我就壓根兒沒擔心過我北京的屋子裏會被竊聽，我尋思著就那幫人的英文水平根本不可能聽懂我們這種從幾角旮旯裏冒出來的美國話。”那些字迅速出現在了電腦屏幕上，除了“幾角旮旯”變成了“起腳伽藍”。真絕了！
這套係統在IBM公司內部已經開始應用。李博士的團隊裏每個人雖然都會講英文，但天南地北的口音經常令中美兩方的人員難以正常交流，所以每次與紐約方麵進行視頻會議時，英語發言都被即時地轉換成相應的文字出現在大屏幕下方，有助於中國的科學家們更好地理解。這係統雖然還說不上完美，但我從二十年前就開始關注這類產品，目前這個是唯一一個令我過目難忘的，它已經成熟到能夠自動給電視、廣播、Youtube等視頻中的語音設立文字索引。這樣一來，你搜一個詞（比如“邪惡軸心”），所有包含這個詞發音的視頻和音頻就都能找出來了。
另有兩個項目也很不錯，很適合在這經濟艱難的時候推廣。一個是暫定名為“盤古”(Pangoo)的商業管理軟件，完全是中國的電腦工程師設計的，專為那些家庭作坊式的小生意而量身打造，服務內容涵蓋賬戶管理、資金往來、網絡設計等等，據說其應用能給那些小公司省不少錢。另一個項目是關於生產控製的係統，通過它，中國公司可以將能源消耗和汙染排放控製到最低水平。這兩個項目之所以引起我的注意，是因為通過它們我看到，作為著名跨國公司的半獨立部門，這個中國團隊正試圖將危機化為商機，從逆境中尋找希望，這份自信和努力令人動容。
中國企業試圖鳳凰涅磐體現得最為淋漓盡致的一個例子在深圳，它的名字叫“比亞迪”。這個公司剛剛宣布的發展計劃口氣大得近乎可笑，它要在2025年成為世界第一大汽車製造商。了解這個公司曆史的人會明白，他們絕對不是在說笑。
1987年，一個叫王傳福的年輕人從長沙的中南工業大學冶金物理化學係畢業。8年後，他三十出頭，與兄弟朋友合夥開了家叫“比亞迪”的公司，專門生產電池。又過了7年，到了2002年，比亞迪在香港上市。2005年，比亞迪成為世界小型電池領域的領頭羊。如果你用過手機、數碼相機、iPod、電動牙刷、便攜式吸塵器這類的小玩意兒，你十有八九就用過比亞迪的電池。這個公司目前擁有超過13萬名員工，在中國設有7家大廠。我花了一個下午參觀了它的深圳分廠，那裏與其說是工廠，不如說是一個規模龐大的社區，巨大的足球場、鱗次櫛比的高檔公寓、綠樹成蔭的公園，這一切讓人目不暇接。
“王總曾經是搞材料科學的，我們這兒很多高層領導也都是搞材料科學的”，比亞迪高級副總裁斯特拉·李對我說，“我們認為，一旦搞懂了材料，很多問題迎刃而解。”她這話是有所指的。去年，比亞迪爆出了一個令世界側目的大新聞——推出全球第一款可商業化量產的雙模電動汽車“F3DM”。我開著F3DM在他們的停車場附近轉了幾圈，速度輕鬆上了60邁，再踩油門提速，常規汽油發動機就開始工作了。該車使用的鐵電池完全充電需要7小時，對充電電源要求不高，普通家庭的插座就可以；一副電池可反複充電多達1000次。當我一個人在那裏試車時，不小心按了個“汽油發動機”的按鍵，這車噌得一下就躥了出去，推背感強烈，行駛表現與常規的汽油車毫無二致。這車的建議零售價是美金兩萬二，在中國算比較貴，但在美國和歐洲卻顯得很便宜，而且國外目前市麵上還根本沒有能與之競爭的同類型車。
也許比亞迪隻會是個曇花一現的公司，將帶著“世界第一輛商用電動車”的桂冠黯然退場(就像80年代生產出世界第一款筆記本電腦的奧斯博公司一樣)；但也許，他真會成為這一行業的霸主。誰知道呢？大家走著瞧吧。在我采訪比亞迪一個月後，王傳福帶著他的F3DM第一次出現在底特律汽車展，很多美國媒體表現出的不是震驚而是嘲笑——不遺餘力地嘲笑比亞迪宣傳材料上的蹩腳英文以及F3DM平庸呆板的外形。“我們當然能把車造得更好看”，斯特拉·李曾對我說，“設計和製造汽車是各個環節中比較容易的那部分。”這話說得難免顯得有些故作輕鬆，她又進一步解釋說，她們公司對在電池領域的先進地位很有信心，而且比亞迪的縱向整合生產係統(指比亞迪生產其汽車的每一個部件)保證了公司的長期優勢。她的話有多少可信度我們暫且不談，反正股神巴菲特去年年底拿出了2億3千萬美金收購了比亞迪10%的股權，那可是實打實的真金白銀。
比亞迪在汽車方麵的發展規劃是在2015年做到中國第一，到2025年做到世界第一。當王傳福在深圳第一次推出他的F3DM時，恰逢美國國會為要不要批準政府出錢援救通用和克萊斯勒而吵得不可開交。我當時問王傳福能不能給美國的汽車製造商提點兒建議，他有點兒楞神兒。他是屬於那種比較安靜，甚至有點兒書呆子氣的人。沉吟良久，他通過翻譯對我說，“100多年了，底特律的三大汽車廠一直都沒有什麽改變。我想，他們是時候改改他們的生產線了。”
六
美國人應該記住，中國目前隻是暫遇挫折，而絕不是就此出局。
如果中國真的像蘇聯，那它也許會被龐大而不滿的失業大軍衝垮；如果中國真的像日本，它也許會未來的一二十年裏一路跌跌撞撞看不到出頭之日。這兩種情況發生任何一種，美國人也許會對中國依然貧苦的大眾略表同情，但同時也會為少了個競爭對手而長舒一口氣。
我其實認為這兩種情況都不太可能發生。大部分的中國人可能仍然難以擺脫貧困，他們的工作（如果還有工作的話）仍然會是全球生產鏈條的最低端，但我深信，他們絕不會聯合起來全麵反抗現有的社會製度。中國公司將會竭盡全力地爭取全球價值鏈條中更高端的位置。兩年前我報道深圳的工廠時就描述過中國現有的外向型經濟模式：拿著微薄薪金的中國工人在車間裏拚命組裝貼著世界各國牌子的產品，而美國等發達國家的研發人員、設計人員、投資者和消費者享受著高利潤和高回報。中國政府和中國公司都已經明確表示，他們本應該獲得更多。
外國人可以指責中國政府人為提高出口補貼或是壓低人民幣幣值，但沒有人有資格指責中國希望她的人民獲得更多的利潤回報。很多中國公司或許會在當下殘酷的經濟環境中倒下，但也會有很多中國公司將利用這個機會，為他們的下一次飛躍做好充分的準備。問題是，我們美國人做好同樣的準備了嗎？
更正：
大西洋月刊的印刷版上關於中國煤礦每天死亡250人的統計數據並不正確。數據來自新華社，該社自己也做了更正，但當時大西洋月刊4月刊已經交付印刷了。根據新華社提供的最新數據，煤礦事故每日死亡人數為9人，250人是中國所有事故導致的每天死亡人數。具體的解釋，請見作者本人的博客。
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China's Way Forward
Idle factories, moored container ships, widespread bankruptcies, massive migration back to the hinterlands, strangely clean air—the signs of depression are everywhere in China. Because it makes so many of the goods the world isn’t buying now, China stands to be worse hit than the rest of the world —just as America was during the Depression, when it was the world’s sweatshop. But like America then, China will use tough times to design innovative products that will get it the high profits and the high-value jobs Americans kept to themselves for decades. And that is very bad news for the United States, unless it uses tough times to reinvent itself, too.
by James Fallows
Our apartment in Beijing overlooks one of the city’s long-distance bus terminals, where people arrive from the countryside to find work or sell wares, and depart for visits or permanent returns to their home villages. Early last summer, the terminal was jammed, and most of the passengers were leaving town.
At the time, the outbound flow was taken as one more last-minute sign of China’s optimistic, all-fronts effort to spiff up Beijing for its role as Olympic host. Through the spring, construction workers had toiled round the clock on any building or public-works project (notably, new subway stations) that had a chance of being completed by the time of the Games. For projects with no hope of making the deadline, workers toiled instead to put up screening walls, or to neaten the piles of I-beams and rebar that normally littered the sites. In July the government ordered a halt to all building or demolition work anywhere near Beijing, as part of a security lockdown and in hopes that construction dust would settle out of the air. The workers, mostly migrants from poorer neighboring provinces, went home on (mostly unpaid) leave to see their families and watch the Games on village TVs.
In September, as Olympic spectators were leaving Beijing, migrant workers returned, via packed buses and trains. In the capital as in fast-growing cities all across China, country people stand out in the urban crowd. Their hands and faces are more weathered, their clothes simpler and more ragged. Often they move about town lugging unwieldy bundles of bedding and belongings wrapped in the plaid-patterned, woven-plastic fabric that somehow has become standard for such purposes in poor countries around the world.
This post-Olympic flow back into the city was expected—but what happened next was not. In mid-October, at about the time retail sales were collapsing in the United States, we started seeing extra buses muster each morning with full loads of migrants headed out of town again. On an icy afternoon in November, I passed a site where a huge new office complex was being built. Its towering construction cranes, which just a week earlier had been swinging loads of cement and steel so close to the sidewalk that passersby ducked, were motionless. The frontage road was lined with buses whose license plates were from Hebei province—the sticks. A driver told me that the convoy would take workers back to their home village—“For now, no work”—and then come back for another load as soon as it dropped this batch off.
Through the rest of the winter and early this spring, Beijing’s air stayed notably clearer than it had been at the same time a year ago. Part of that was because of unusually windy weather, and part may have been a residual benefit of Olympic cleanup measures. But it was also a sign that fewer factories were running in the heavy-industrial districts upwind of Beijing.
The outbound buses and the better air were our local indicators of the economic contraction being felt in practically every corner of the world. And there were signs of it everywhere in China. Container ships sitting, moored and idle, in the harbor of Hong Kong. Revenues down in Macau’s casinos. Seas of empty seats aboard a small Airbus on the Shanghai-Beijing shuttle flight. (The first time I took that trip, in 2006, it was aboard a 747 with every seat full.) A report that a million or more of this year’s university graduates were still looking for jobs. Protests across the country, as real-estate developers and small-factory owners went bankrupt—and disappeared without paying employees months of back wages. Thousands of factories in Dongguan, in Guangdong province just north of Hong Kong, had been the real-life incarnation of the world’s stereotype of low-wage Chinese workers turning out low-value goods—cheap dolls and toys, Halloween masks, the bulk of the world’s Christmas presents and decorations. Within months the area was transformed into China’s rust belt.
You never know which statistics to believe in China, but in January a local official in Dongguan told me that at least 1 million factory workers had recently lost their jobs within five miles of where I was, and probably another million in nearby manufacturing areas of Guangdong province. The electronics supplier Foxconn, whose gigantic compound in Shenzhen turns out components for Apple, Dell, HP, and countless other companies and which had recently employed more than 250,000 workers, sent all its employees on a one-month unpaid furlough late last year. Reports in the Chinese press said Foxconn might lay off 100,000 worldwide.
Is the “China story” as we’ve known it—the three-decade-long story of modernization and prosperity supervised by an authoritarian regime whose economic success excuses most complaints and failings—over? Has it reached its limits and exposed its contradictions? If China does not keep moving forward and growing, will it tear itself apart?
Observers outside China often compare its difficulties to Japan’s a generation earlier. Few people inside China think the two economies have much in common—one is full of impoverished peasants, while the other has practically eliminated poverty; one is rushing toward industrialization while the other has been an industrial power for more than a century. But in recent months, I’ve heard countless Americans and a few Europeans ask, “Isn’t this just like the ‘Japan scare’ of the 1980s?” The question is shorthand for saying: “Japan seemed unstoppable 20 years ago and has been a sick man ever since. Is ‘rising’ China perhaps due for a similar reassessment?”
From Chinese intellectuals and officials I’ve more often heard a cautionary comparison to the old Soviet Union, implying that political control and territorial dominion could be undone by economic failure. By this logic, the Chinese Communist Party has no choice but to keep the country’s business growing as fast as possible, since a steady increase in material welfare is the real basis of the party’s legitimacy. If the economy were ever to stagnate—which is generally understood to mean a growth rate that falls below about 8 percent per year—then a larger share of the Chinese public might register dis content with Communist rule. And then anything could happen. The territorial contrast between the vast old Soviet empire and today’s shrunken Russian state may help explain the Chinese government’s intransigence about any threat of what it dismisses as “splittism” concerning Tibet, the Muslim region of Xinjiang, or Taiwan.
The Japanese and Soviet comparisons are awkward because of obvious differences from China. At no point in its history did the Soviet Union achieve anything like China’s sustained record of high-speed growth. So the “stagnation” that helped bring the Soviet regime down was in fact real, decades-long economic decline. Japan’s prolonged “sickness” is one most countries would envy: with half as many people as America and one-tenth as many as China, Japan still has the world’s second-largest economy and many of its strongest industrial brands, including the world’s largest carmaker, Toyota. Moreover, both Japan and the Soviet Union at times presented themselves as models of different paths toward modernity. Modern China is a force and a reality, but not a model or an idea that others might replicate. The Chinese system will remain unique. (The one nation that shares its scale, India, does not share its political precepts. No other nation that could build roads, airports, and industrial parks as modern as China’s could impose so repressive a political regime.)
Still, thinking of how previous models might apply to China raises a valid point. The Soviet Union’s political control was finally undone by its economic failures. And the parts of Japan’s system that truly don’t work—mainly the financial markets, which have yet to emerge from a 20-year slump—reflect its difficulty in adjusting to changes in the world economy. So if China’s rise is not undone by the risks that have been evident for years—pollution, water shortage, corruption, the widening rich-poor social gap, safety standards so primitive that on average more than 250 people die each day in coal-mine accidents—might China prove vulnerable to Soviet-style discontent born of a slowing economy? Or to Japanese-style inability to understand how the world is changing all around it?
My guess is No. China faces big problems, and its modern history has been marked by the unforeseen. Perhaps we will look back at the spectacle and choreography of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies as the last time the world thought there was no limit to what China could achieve. But I am betting the other way.
Let’s begin by considering how bad things could get, for China and those it influences. The clearest approach I’ve heard to this question comes from Michael Pettis, the Beijing-based finance professor whose side business as a rock-music impresario I described in the March Atlantic. To think about China’s predicament in the late 2000s, he says, you should think about America’s in the 1920s.
Through the early 1900s, the United States played a role in the world economy surprisingly similar to China’s in recent years. Until the start of World War I, the United States had long been a “net debtor” country. It had relied on foreign loans and investments to build the factories and lay the railroads that ultimately made it an industrial titan. By the end of World War I, it had become a “net creditor,” as its undamaged industrial base supplied European combatants and the former customers of ruined European companies.
In the 1920s, its farms and industries made America the workshop of the world. It ran trade surpluses with most other economies, which meant that a disproportionate share of the world’s jobs were in America (it was doing work that other people consumed), and a disproportionate share of what it made went for other people’s use. Foreigners paid the difference by transferring gold reserves—John Maynard Keynes complained at the time that the United States was amassing “all the bullion in the world”—or taking on loans and investments from Americans. So far, this is like China’s story. And so far, so good.
This very role as global exporter made the United States unusually vulnerable when global demand collapsed in the 1930s. Having had more than its “fair” share of the world’s jobs to begin with, America had more of them to lose. This doesn’t mean that Americans suffered more deeply than Europeans. We got Franklin Roosevelt; they got Hitler, Stalin, Franco, and Mussolini. But as a matter of plain economics, the layoffs and unemployment of the Depression years were worse in the United States.
That is the problem for China now. Many Americans would assume that China’s recent history of trade surpluses would be its bulwark during a recession. In the long run, it will be, because it has provided a $2 trillion war chest in foreign holdings. But in the short run, China’s reliance on foreign customers turns out to be a serious vulnerability.
Pettis wrote recently that China’s worldwide trade surplus, “the cleanest measure of overcapacity”—factories that are running and workers who are employed only because of foreign customers—is by one measure at least as large as America’s was in 1929. China today, like America then, has a trade surplus equal to about 0.5 percent of global economic output. But as a proportion of its own economic output, China’s trade surplus is much bigger than America’s was. In proportional terms, today’s China is five times as reliant on foreign customers to create domestic jobs as America was in 1929. So unless China can find a way to keep selling when its customers have stopped buying, it will face a proportionately greater employment shock.
That China might indeed try to keep selling is the concluding part of Pettis’s cautionary analogy to the Depression era. As stock markets crashed and economies collapsed, the U.S. trade surplus nearly disappeared. American businesses, desperate to preserve markets and jobs, lobbied for passage of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which increased duties on a list of some 20,000 imported goods. Soon afterward, other countries retaliated with similar tariffs; world trade dried up, and the Great Depression was on. When people use the words “Smoot-Hawley” today, they usually mean them as a warning that any interference with trade, especially by the United States, could again prove disastrous.
Pettis’s point is different, and in a way more worrisome. The real damage of Smoot-Hawley, he says, was less economic than political. Other countries understood that the United States was trying to protect its trade surplus and therefore its workforce. They didn’t like it as a political matter, and they struck back.
If that were to happen again, would it be because of “Buy American” provisions or other forms of American “protectionism” editorial pages so often warn against? That’s the wrong thing to worry about, according to this logic. The real counterpart to Smoot-Hawley would be Chinese protectionism—or rather, any effort by China to defend its huge trade surpluses, as the U.S. once did. China’s government is unlikely to rely on outright Smoot-Hawley–style tariffs. Instead it could increase subsidies to exporters; it could try to push the RMB’s value back down, after three years of letting the currency rise; it could encourage manufacturers to restrain wages; it could impose indirect barriers to imports, as with its recent pressure on China’s airlines to cancel outstanding orders for Boeing and Airbus airplanes. By early this year, China’s government was in fact doing every one of these things. As a result its global trade surplus, instead of shrinking as expected when the world economy deteriorated, grew dramatically. Exports fell, but imports fell much more: in January, exports declined by 17 percent and imports by more than twice as much—by 43 percent. This is an economic problem for other countries. But it could be an even more serious political provocation, if China is seen as forcing its share of unemployment problems onto everyone else. And thus, to bring this scenario to a close, the best China can expect from today’s shocks might be unemployment rates higher than America’s in the ’30s. The worst would be for China to start a trade war that makes things even harder for itself.
China’s emergence as America’s financier has steadily increased its leverage over the United States. But in the short run—rather, for however long the current crisis lasts—the two countries really are codependent in a way neither fully anticipated. Early this year, Chinese officials began saying more and more bluntly what Gao Xiqing, who manages some $200 billion of Chinese holdings in the United States, conveyed artfully in an interview in our pages in December 2008: that if America wants to keep using China’s money, it had better put its economy back on track. It should be saving and investing more, borrowing and consuming less. At the Davos conference in January, Premier Wen Jiabao made the point by outright scolding America for dragging down everyone with its excesses.
Okay already! But the more Americans obey these orders, the worse things look for China in the short run, since American overconsumption is exactly what has kept those Chinese factories a-hum. Americans are in a similar bind with their complaints about China. U.S. officials want China to reduce its trade surplus—while also hoping that China’s financiers will keep buying U.S. Treasury notes and stocks in U.S. companies with the dollars they get from that very trade surplus. We can’t have it both ways. The Chinese can give us money, or they can give us back some jobs, but not both.
So America will keep looking for the bottom of its economic descent, while Chinese businesses and workers endure a severe blow—one China’s leaders can’t really change by lecturing Americans. Why do I think the Chinese have good reasons for hope?
One answer lies in the realm of straight economics. Some of the lost demand is sure to be picked up within China itself, thanks to a stimulus plan that, at some 4 trillion RMB (about $600 billion), is proportionately much larger than the one proposed by the Obama administration, because the Chinese economy is so much smaller than America’s. Yes, there are grounds for skepticism about the Chinese plan. Some of the total represents a new label for projects already approved or begun. Some of the 4 trillion RMB is supposed to come not from the central government but from local and provincial authorities, who have no obvious way to raise it during a recession. Although one important element will be basic health-care coverage for average Chinese citizens, most of the money will be spent on construction projects, especially for transportation and infrastructure: more highways, an expanded high-speed railroad system, scores of new airports all across the country. Construction is the Chinese government’s first response to most problems—if it is worried that its universities are weak by international standards, it approves a plan to build new research centers—and the construction projects are subject to insider deals and kickbacks like those in most of the world. But laying concrete and raising girders employs a lot of people, especially the way those tasks are done in China, so this will be an option for some of the migrant workers now being sent home from factories.
Heaped on my desk are other sector-by-sector analyses suggesting that the rebound may come more quickly than the gross-demand figures indicate. “When can we expect to see signs of life in the mainland economy?” asked Andy Rothman, of CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, in one such report, about the cement and steel industries. “Our answer is, March or April 2009,” when the first orders from the stimulus program will reach steel and cement companies.
As in America, real-estate values have fallen throughout China; but China’s bad-loan problem is nothing like America’s subprime-loan disaster. America’s banks have too little money. China’s have a lot, and the main reason they have not been lending is that until very recently the government was more worried about inflation than anything else. “Chinese banks are not only very liquid, they will lend when directed by the Party, which appoints all senior bankers,” Rothman wrote. They are being so directed now.
I have a lot more reports from a lot more sectors, but all lead toward the same conclusion: China’s economy may suffer more than most others, but it also has more tools and resources in reserve than most others.
Beyond straight economics, the “China is over” hypothesis seems to miss important cultural and political realities. Its unspoken premise is that average Chinese people just barely tolerate the social bargain the government now offers—limited freedom, potentially unlimited wealth. So if the regime ever falls short on its material promises, the deal will be off and people will rebel.
This does not square with what I have seen. I have often wondered why so many people in different roles and regions in China seem vivid. The answer has to be more than contrast with my own blandness. I think it is because being in China today is like being in Western Europe in the 1950s. No one’s family story is dull or uneventful. People doing routine jobs have been through great hardships and dramatic swings of fate. Last year I interviewed a party official in Shanxi province who was laying out his regional-development plans. Every 10 or 15 minutes, he would stop and say (through an interpreter), “Do you understand? If it had not been for Deng Xiaoping, I would be behind an ox in a field right now. I would not be sitting here wearing a necktie and talking to a foreigner.” Or, “Do you understand how different this is? My mother has bound feet!” A scholar I know in Beijing once offhandedly remarked that he had developed self-confidence when learning that he could survive for four years as a teenager on a labor gang during the Cultural Revolution. People in their teens and 20s were not on the labor gangs—kids today!—but they have heard the stories.
Layoffs and stagnant wages? People have seen worse. Last summer my wife and I went through villages in Sichuan province where refugees from earthquakes prepared for the next few years of residence in temporary shelters and tents. Laid-off migrant workers are returning to many of these same villages now. This is terribly hard, but in the same villages, grandparents remember when half the local population starved to death during the famines of Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” in the 1950s.
When my wife and I first visited China in the mid-1980s, most people with paying jobs toiled in big, primitive, inefficient factories for the so-called state-owned enterprises, or SOEs. In one unheated, acres-wide factory in Hangzhou, we saw some 5,000 women attending old-fashioned looms to make hangings and tapestries of traditional Chinese scenes, with no indication that anyone ever bought them. Some SOEs persist—most of the very biggest companies in China, from the oil and telecom firms to the major airlines, are their spin-offs or descendants. But when Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms began in earnest in the 1990s, the most wasteful SOEs were closed down—eliminating many tens of millions of jobs in just a few years. Chinese social-realist novels set in the 1990s are about people laid off from the SOEs. Those set in the 2000s are about migrant workers—or urban professionals. The SOE recession was a major social strain, but it did not come close to bringing the government down. The Chinese people weathered that downturn—and more significant, so did the system that rules the country. People in China are as demanding as anyone else, and expectations have risen. But it is hard to see why the hardships just ahead will be the ones the Chinese public finds intolerable or that push the system toward Soviet-style collapse.
Westerners who have not traveled in China might be surprised at how outspoken ordinary Chinese people can be. When cars or bicycles collide (often), the parties involved get out to yell at each other and at the cops, and plead their case to the gathering crowd. Workers complain about bosses who have cheated them. Residents complain about the landlord. In Western China my wife and I met families from villages that were being flooded by new dam projects. They showed us around the new quarters they’d been assigned, pointing out the cracks and defects and itemizing the ways it was worse than where they used to live. It all seems normal to an American.
But when people complain, it is usually about those crooked bosses, reporters, mayors, or bureaucrats—not about the system or its rulers. Principled protests against the system and its repression certainly do exist, as with the daring “Charter 08” petition for civil liberties signed by more than 300 intellectuals late last year. But that is not the norm. Ten years ago, when the Asian financial crisis drove China’s unemployment rate above 10 percent, demonstrations broke out across the country. “But the laid-off workers were almost always fighting for their rights—unemployment benefits that they believed were stolen by local officials—rather than fighting against the central government policies that led to the job loss,” Andy Rothman of CLSA wrote recently. Perhaps these workers are missing the big picture, but for now they generally act as if they expect the national system to protect them against lapses at the local level.
There is one more part of the big picture: the opportunities that today’s disruption may be opening for future Chinese growth.
Nearly 30 years ago, during another big worldwide downturn, I went to Silicon Valley and to Detroit for this magazine, to compare the way two different industrial cultures coped with economic hardship. Many of the companies I visited in each place are still with us—GM and Ford in Detroit; Apple, Intel, and HP in Silicon Valley. But quite a few I visited in California have now vanished. (Remember Eagle Computer Company, or Osborne?) We know that the high-tech industry is a source of growth, but—unless you work in it—you can easily forget that it’s extremely volatile. Then as now, people in the high-tech business emphasized that even though no one likes being disrupted, the volatility of America’s industrial culture is a necessary part of its success. It couldn’t produce so many new companies with new technologies if it weren’t so ruthless at eliminating old ones.
Chinese industry has also been volatile, but in a way that has done less good for China’s economy as a whole. The small-business culture of China is one of the few parts of the world where Americans are considered sluggish and hyper-deliberative. As small companies scramble against each other to cut pennies from costs and minutes from schedules, they have become more nimble as subcontractors. But they still don’t keep much of the final rewards for themselves. Thus today’s shock is more than such companies can offset just by cutting costs.
In Beijing, in Shanghai, in Shenzhen, and elsewhere, I’ve recently visited companies that are trying to use the disruption of this moment to enter wholly new markets and do what so few Chinese firms have yet done: make high-tech, high-value products that bring high rewards. In a country as big and chaotic as China, you can find illustrations of any “trend” you want. But in only a few weeks of asking, I found indications of companies that were growing rather than shrinking, and of corporate leaders who were pouring in money based on their belief that now, when competitors are at their weakest and talent and assets could be snapped up cheap, is the time to prepare for their next big advance.
In Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong, I went to see Liam Casey, the Irish entrepreneur I described two years ago as “Mr. China” for his success in matching big, famous foreign companies with small, obscure Chinese factories that can produce brand-name products quickly and well. Casey said that of the top 100 Chinese companies he works with regularly, not one had gone out of business. While many were struggling, some viewed the recession as a chance to move into higher-value work and introduce their own advanced products rather than serving strictly as subcontractors. (Several such items, like new tablet computers and handheld GPS devices, were displayed at the latest Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.)
In a far-southern suburb of Beijing, I visited a new “retail research center” being built by a very large Chinese retail company I agreed not to name. Chinese retailers have at least as many problems as their counterparts overseas. Apart from the global falloff in demand, their customers recognize the difference between modern, efficient operators like Carrefour, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and IKEA, all well-established in China, and the local department stores that bring a Soviet-era touch to convenience and customer care. Traditional Chinese-owned grocery and department stores can be dirty and dark; at some, you need to queue in one line to choose a product, another to pay, and yet another to show the receipt and pick up your item.
The CEO of one of the antiquated operators spent a week at a major U.S. consumer-goods company and became a convert to the idea that stores should be laid out for the customer’s convenience and interest. And with the zeal of a convert, he hired an American hotshot as his adviser and is now building a research center next to the “corporate learning center” he recently completed. At the learning center, employees take classes on international standards of service, cleanliness, and convenience, and act out drills of how to handle customers. In the new research center, the company will try out different floor plans, displays, and sale offers for its stores, and then see which ones appeal to focus groups of Chinese shoppers. The whole approach could turn out to be a boondoggle. But the American adviser, who showed me around, had moved his young family to Beijing because he believed the company was sincere about learning to meet the likes of Carrefour on their own terms.
At the far-opposite end of Greater Beijing, in a special government-sponsored research park, I visited the China Research Lab of IBM. The lab’s director, Thomas Li, has a life story like those I have heard at many successful tech and manufacturing companies. He was raised in Taiwan, by parents who had grown up on the mainland. He went to America for his doctorate, had a successful career with a U.S. firm—and then decided, for reasons of opportunity and sentiment, to be part of everything going on in mainland China. In 2002 Li moved with his family to Beijing, where he directs a 200-person team of mainly Chinese-trained computer scientists.
One product demo made me wish I could get out a checkbook on the spot. It addressed two of the real-world problems most difficult for computers to handle: converting spoken language to written text, and converting written text from one language to another. Computers have “done” both of these tasks for years, but they have not done them accurately enough to be worth the bother. Having watched many similar demonstrations, I was startled by this one. My wife and I were the only native speakers of English in the room. But when each of us spoke into the voice-recognition system, it produced nearly perfect real-time versions of what we said. I had been speaking with deliberate clarity, so as a test I said the following words at fast conversational speed: “I never worry that my apartment is bugged in Beijing, because I figure there aren’t that many non-native speakers who can understand high-speed slangy American speech.” Those very words, except “slangy” (which had become “slinky”), were on the screen. Hmmmm.
Although everyone in Li’s lab speaks English, differences in accent can be a barrier in discussions with native speakers. So on video conference calls with their IBM colleagues in Armonk, New York, the Chinese scientists listen to what is said in English—and see a nearly real-time English transcription running across the bottom of the screen, which greatly aids their comprehension. I am sure it is not perfect, but I have seen enough such projects through the decades to be impressed with this one. Based on another demo I saw, it is already mature enough to allow spoken words—from TV, radio, commercials, YouTube—to be indexed and therefore retrieved as accurately as ordinary text. The words could then be translated and searched, in the original language or others, so that video clips, say, would be easy to find by a phrase (“axis of evil”) someone says in them.
Two other projects directly addressed the opportunities created by hard times. One, with the internal working name Pangoo, is meant for the millions of family businesses too big to continue keeping their accounts and records by hand, and too small to afford regular business-management software. It is a suite of business applications—account management, billing, Web design—tailored by Chinese-trained computer scientists for Chinese companies that need to save money. Another allows Chinese companies to minimize power use and other sources of pollution when determining how to time their production schedules and obtain supplies. Other companies in other countries are working toward similar goals. This project impressed me because a fairly autonomous, Chinese-run and -staffed division of a major global company was acting as if today’s economic turmoil was an opportunity.
The most dramatic illustration of a Chinese firm trying to capitalize on this moment occurred in the far-eastern corner of Shenzhen. There, a purely Chinese startup firm called BYD has announced plans that would seem laughable were it not for what the company has already achieved.
In 1987, Wang Chuanfu got his bachelor’s degree in metallurgy from Central South University, in Changsha. Eight years later, in his early 30s, he founded the BYD Company with a cousin and a friend, to specialize in battery development. Seven years after that, in 2002, the company went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange. By 2005, BYD was the leading small-battery company in the world. If you use a cell phone, a digital camera, an iPod, an electric toothbrush, a portable vacuum cleaner, you’re probably using one of its batteries. It employs some 130,000 people at seven main facilities in China. I spent an afternoon touring its Shenzhen works, complete with soccer stadium for employee games, extensive apartment complexes for employees’ families and schools for their children, and gardens with the palm trees that Shenzhen’s tropical climate permits.
“Dr. Wang was trained in material sciences, and our senior leaders are expert in material sciences,” Stella Li, the company’s senior vice president, told me. “We feel that if you understand materials very well, many things are possible.” In particular she meant the development that propelled BYD into international news late last year: its unveiling of the world’s first mass-produced battery-powered hybrid car that could be recharged on normal household current. The new F3DM model, which I drove around a parking lot, can run for at least 60 miles purely on battery power, after which a gasoline engine kicks in. The iron-based battery recharges fully in seven hours; it is said to be good for well over 1,000 charge/recharge cycles, an unusually high number. When I pressed the “gas”—and I was alone in the car, with no minder—I was pushed back in the seat as far as I am with my normal car. The announced retail price for the car is $22,000—expensive in China, cheap in the U.S. or European market, where no comparable plug-in cars are yet on the market.
Whether BYD will eventually be known only for producing the first such electric car (as Osborne Computer was known for producing the first, suitcase-size “portable” in the early 1980s) or instead becomes the leading producer, no one can tell. When Wang unveiled the car at the Detroit Auto Show a month after I saw it in Shenzhen, much of the U.S. press tittered about mistranslations in the BYD promotional material and the stodginess of the car’s design. “Oh, we can always make the car look better!” Stella Li told me when I asked her about that. “Designing the car, building the car, that is the easy part.” She was being deliberately breezy: she went on to explain the company’s faith that its demonstrated edge in battery technology, plus its engineering skills and “vertically integrated” manufacturing system—it builds almost all of the car’s components itself—will give it a long-term advantage. And against the snickering of the U.S. auto press was Warren Buffett’s purchase of 10 percent of the company, for $230 million, late last year.
The company’s official goal is to be the biggest automaker in China by 2015, and the biggest in the world by 2025. Wang’s unveiling of the car in Shenzhen coincided with U.S. congressional debate about emergency aid to GM and Chrysler. I asked Wang if he had any tips for the U.S. companies. He is a quiet, nerdish man who seemed to blanch as he heard the question translated. “For 100 years, nothing has changed in Detroit,” he finally said (through the interpreter). “I think they need to reconsider their product lines.”
China is down. It is not out. This has important implications for America.
If China were truly like the old Soviet Union, the coming mass unemployment might be the shock that finally turned the people against their rulers. If it were truly like Japan, it might spend a decade or two chugging along but not aligning its systems to new international realities. In either case, Americans might feel sorry for China’s still-impoverished masses—but less worried about its competitive challenge.
I suspect that China will be like neither. Most of its people will still be very poor. Most of the jobs they hold—when they have jobs—will still be near the bottom of the global value chain. But they will not, I believe, be in fundamental revolt against the country’s governing system. And the companies they create, manage, and work for will be constantly trying to improve their position on that value chain. Two years ago, after reporting on factories in Shenzhen, I described an economic symbiosis in which Chinese workers assembled many of the world’s products—while inventors, designers, shareholders, and consumers from America or other rich countries got the lion’s share of the financial returns. It is the announced policy of the Chinese government, and of many Chinese companies, to keep more of the rewards in China.
Outsiders can rightly criticize the Chinese government if it tries to sneak in new export subsidies or push the RMB’s value back down. But no one can criticize its ambition to increase the rewards for its people’s work. Many Chinese companies will fail or make mistakes under today’s intense pressure. But many are using the moment to prepare for their next advance. The question for Americans to think about is how we are using the same moment.
Correction: The print version of this piece incorrectly reported that 250 people die each day in Chinese coal-mining accidents. This figure was drawn from a release by the government-controlled Xinhua news agency, which issued its own correction after the Atlantic piece had already gone to press. Based on the updated information from Xinhua, the number of people who die in Chinese coal-mining accidents each day is in fact about nine. A total of 250 people a day die from accidents of all sorts. For a more detailed explanation, see James Fallows' blog post on this subject.
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