風蕭蕭_Frank
以文會友
《紐約時報》專欄作家弗裏德曼：美國還沒醒時，中國已在所有高科技製造業取得巨大飛躍
熊超然 2024-12-18 觀察者網
【文/觀察者網 熊超然】“我剛剛在北京和上海待了一周，會見了中國官員、經濟學家和企業家，我開門見山地說吧，當我們還在沉睡時，中國在所有高科技製造業方麵都取得了巨大的飛躍。”當地時間12月17日，《紐約時報》知名專欄作家托馬斯·弗裏德曼（Thomas Friedman）在該報發表了一篇長篇評論文章，記錄了他近期中國之行的所見所得和所思所想。
回到美國後，弗裏德曼特別希望告訴即將上台執政的特朗普，正是在中國社交媒體上被戲稱為“川建國”的他，過去極盡抨擊中國和加征關稅之能事，促使中國加倍奮起，在電動汽車、機器人和稀有材料等諸多領域取得全球霸主地位，並盡可能實現獨立於美國的決心。
過去8年裏，中國先進的製造業實力在規模、成熟度和數量上都出現了爆炸式增長，重返白宮的特朗普會發現，如今他將遇到的中國，是一個更加強大的“出口引擎”——就像吃菠菜的大力水手那樣強壯。正是中國的這種強大，讓弗裏德曼認為，特朗普揮舞的“關稅大棒”並不會奏效，反而會激起中國的反製，到那時美國產業的關鍵物資供應甚至會被切斷。
弗裏德曼在中國時發現，一些中方專家也都希望中美關係緩和，中國仍然需要美國市場來出口其產品，但也不會任人擺布。因此，如果中美能達成一項協議，雙方都采取很久以前就應該采取的行動，那麽中美都將受益匪淺。
這篇文章的標題叫做“如何用埃隆·馬斯克和泰勒·斯威夫特緩和中美關係”，作者“新穎地”提出，美國需要抓緊時間培育更多馬斯克，即能夠製造大型產品的本土製造商，以增加出口並減少進口；中國則需要在這段時間讓更多的斯威夫特湧現，即為年輕人提供更多機會去消費國外娛樂產品，同時生產和提供更多商品和服務。
然而遺憾的是，在弗裏德曼看似倡導“中美合作共贏”的文章裏，還是出現了“競爭”、“零和博弈”等觀念，似乎暴露了他的真正立場——“但如果我們不利用這段時間，像當年應對蘇聯1957年發射世界上第一顆人造衛星“斯普特尼克”（Sputnik）那樣，用我們自己全麵的科學、創新和工業攻勢來回應中國，那麽完蛋的將是我們。”
托馬斯·弗裏德曼 資料圖
文章中，對於中國製造業的強大之處，弗裏德曼作了許多論述，其中提到，從事製造業寫作研究的諾亞·史密斯（Noah Smith），前幾天援引聯合國工業發展組織（UNIDO）的數據，發布了這樣一段內容：
“2000年，美國及其在亞洲、歐洲和拉丁美洲的盟友占全球工業生產的絕大多數，而中國即使在經曆了二十年的快速增長後，也僅占6%。”史密斯寫道：“聯合國機構預測，到2030年，中國將占全球製造業的45%，僅憑一國之力就能與美國及其所有盟友匹敵或超越他們。”
“在世界史上，單一國家在製造業占據主導地位的情況隻出現過兩次——一次是英國在工業革命之初，一次是美國在二戰之後。”史密斯寫道：“這意味著在一場曠日持久的生產戰爭中，全世界聯合起來也不一定能打敗中國。”
弗裏德曼隨後也舉了幾個例子，比如：2019年，當特朗普即將結束其上一個執政任期時，中國銀行業對國內產業的淨貸款額為830億美元。而據中國人民銀行統計，去年這一數字激增到6700億美元。
2019年，弗裏德曼在新冠疫情暴發前訪問中國時，小米和華為還僅僅是中國的智能手機公司。而當他幾周前再度訪華時，這兩家企業都已經成為了電動汽車公司——各自利用自己的電池技術製造出了非常炫酷的電動汽車。而比亞迪這樣的車企也加倍下注，其推出的電動汽車車型海鷗（Seagull）起售價不到1萬美元，物美價廉。
隨著電動汽車產業的飛速發展，為了出口龐大的汽車庫存，中國又打造了由170艘船隻組成的船隊，每次可以跨洋運送數千輛汽車。在新冠疫情暴發前，全球造船廠每年僅能交付4艘這樣的船舶。而當中國遍地安裝汽車充電樁時，蘋果公司15年的“造車夢”已然夭折……
弗裏德曼表示，就當世界各地將逐漸轉向中國製造的自動駕駛電動汽車時，特朗普還在聲稱要加倍投資高油耗汽車，終結美國人購買電動汽車的補貼。如果真的是這樣，美國終有一天會發現，中國將擁有全球電動汽車市場，也將擁有未來——因為自動駕駛汽車市場也是如此。
2024年4月25日，江蘇連雲港港東方港務分公司碼頭，滾裝輪正在裝載新能源汽車出口。 IC Photo
為了減少貿易逆差、讓更多企業在美國本土建廠、促進當地就業，特朗普不斷動用“關稅威脅”，但弗裏德曼提醒，他在2025年所麵對的中國，已經同他在上一個任期時看到的不同。
此次訪華期間，弗裏德曼學到了一個新詞——“黑燈工廠”（dark factory）。從鋼板、手機到家用電器和火箭點火裝置部件，中國越來越多的業務領域正在使用人工智能推動生產，並引入了具有24小時不間斷、無人值守生產能力的“黑燈工廠”。“黑燈工廠”，也被稱為智能工廠，完全由編程機器人運行，無需點燈照明。
“還記得那個古早的玩笑嗎？現代工廠隻需要一人一狗。狗負責阻止人碰機器，而人則負責喂狗。這在中國可不是玩笑。”
除此之外，驅動中國飛速發展的，還有效率快速、創新能力強、善於學習等等這些因素。近年來，江蘇青昀新材料有限公司同杜邦（Dupont）等跨國企業處於競爭態勢，這家中國材料科學公司的創始人兼董事長陳博屹就表示，外國競爭對手升級產品的速度要慢得多，而像他這樣年輕創業者，從眾多中國互聯網巨頭那裏學到的是“快速創新和改進”。
“我們每30天就會升級一些產品。我們可以在六個月內生產出一條新的生產線。我們從埃隆·馬斯克和史蒂夫·喬布斯那裏學到了很多。你們非常擅長將產品從‘0到1’（從無到有），而我們擅長的是將產品‘從2到100’。”
文章後半段，弗裏德曼這樣寫道：“因此，中國會打敗我們嗎？這絕非不可避免的。”一如他在文章標題中所寫，提到了馬斯克和斯威夫特這兩位美國名人。“總而言之，美國需要收緊政策，而中國則需要放寬政策。”
他表示，自己對馬斯克在X平台上的“大喇叭廣播”和討好特朗普十分厭惡，但去過中國之後，卻感染了一種從未想過會感染的“病毒”——“馬斯克崇拜症”。馬斯克的確是一位天才工程師兼企業家，是一個讓中國人既害怕又尊重的美國製造商，而特朗普讓他領導“政府效率部”太瘋狂了，他本應該領導另一種“政府效率部”，一種讓更多美國人能夠“做好工程”的政府機構。
而對於中國，弗裏德曼則全然不提倡科技、發展、創新等字眼，而是鼓吹“如此不平衡的經濟不可持續”，“最終會促使全球貿易聯盟形成對抗”。仔細一看才發現，他所提到的內容，和美國此前炒作渲染的論調差不多。
“世界不會允許中國生產一切產品，而隻進口大豆和土豆；中國需要更多的護士來為國內提供良好的醫療保健；還要減少為國外設計更多汽車的工程師數量。”弗裏德曼甚至還認為，中國消費者對於斯威夫特這樣的美國當紅歌手也有需求，“這對我們兩國都有好處”。
中美關係需要“馬斯克+斯威夫特”
How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations
By Thomas L. Friedman Opinion Columnist
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
If no one has told Donald Trump, then I will: His nickname on Chinese social media today is “Chuan Jianguo” — meaning “Trump the (Chinese) Nation Builder” — because of how his relentless China bashing and tariffs during his first term as president lit a fire under Beijing to double down on its efforts to gain global supremacy in electric cars, robots and rare materials, and to become as independent of America’s markets and tools as possible.
“China had its Sputnik moment — his name was Donald Trump,” Jim McGregor, a business consultant who lived in China for 30 years, told me. “He woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort to take their indigenous scientific, innovative and advanced manufacturing skills to a new level.”
The China that Trump will encounter is a much more formidable export engine. Its advanced manufacturing muscles have exploded in size, sophistication and quantity in the last eight years, even while consumption by its people remains puny.
If I were drawing a picture of China’s economy today as a person, it would have an awesome manufacturing upper body — like Popeye, still eating spinach — with consuming legs resembling thin little sticks.China’s export machine is so strong now that only very high tariffs might really slow it down, and China’s response to very high tariffs could be to start cutting off American industries from crucial supplies that are now available almost nowhere else. That kind of supply-chain warfare is not what anyone, anywhere needs.
The Chinese experts I spoke with during my trip two weeks ago would like to avoid that battle. The Chinese still need the U.S. market for their exports. But they will not be pushovers. Both Beijing and Washington will be much better off with a bargain — one that imposes a gradual increase in U.S. tariffs, while both of us do what we needed to do long ago.
What is that? I call it the “Elon Musk-Taylor Swift paradigm.” America would use higher tariffs on China to buy time to lift up more Elon Musks — more homegrown manufacturers who can make big stuff so we can export more to the world and import less. And China would use the time to let in more Taylor Swifts — more opportunities for its youth to spend money on entertainment and consumer goods made abroad, but also to make more goods and offer more services — particularly in health care — that its own people want to buy.
But if we don’t use this time to respond to China the way we did to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, with our own comprehensive scientific, innovative and industrial push, we will be toast.
You have to go to China to see it, but because a U.S. congressional delegation, led by Senator Chuck Schumer in October 2023, was the first official visit by U.S. lawmakers since 2019 — and because many U.S. companies that moved their American staffs out of China for Covid never returned them — a lot of people in Washington have missed the country’s staggering manufacturing growth.Here’s what Noah Smith, who writes about manufacturing, posted the other day, using data from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization:
In 2000, “the United States and its allies in Asia, Europe and Latin America accounted for the overwhelming majority of global industrial production, with China at just 6 percent even after two decades of rapid growth.” By 2030, Smith wrote, the U.N. agency predicts “China will account for 45 percent of all global manufacturing, single-handedly matching or outmatching the U.S. and all of its allies.
“This is a level of manufacturing dominance by a single country seen only twice before in world history — by the U.K. at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and by the U.S. just after World War II.” Smith wrote, “It means that in an extended war of production, there is no guarantee that the entire world united could defeat China alone.”
Let me offer a few examples of the scale of what we’re talking about: In 2019, as Trump was finishing his last term, net lending by Chinese banks to domestic industries was $83 billion. Last year it swelled to $670 billion, according to the People’s Bank of China. That is not a typo.
When I visited China in 2019, before Covid, Xiaomi and Huawei were only Chinese smartphone companies. When I returned a few weeks ago, both were now also electric car companies — each leveraging its battery technologies to make really cool electric cars.
Xiaomi’s SU7, which is manufactured in a formerly abandoned plant that used to make gasoline-fueled cars, was the talk of the Beijing car show last April. Meanwhile, BYD, the famed Chinese battery company, which already had a car-making subsidiary, doubled down on automobiles. I rode all over Shanghai in super-comfortable BYD electric cars operated by Didi, China’s Uber. BYD now offers a subcompact E.V., the Seagull, that starts at less than $10,000.In an effort to export its large inventory of cars, China has begun construction of a fleet of 170 ships capable of carrying several thousand automobiles at a time across the ocean. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the world’s shipyards were delivering only four such vessels a year. That is also not a typo.
Because China has essentially a national electric grid, it has installed charging stations all over the country, which is why more than half of new car sales in China are of E.V.s. Apple talked for 15 years about making an electric car. Has anyone driven an Apple car?
I took the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai. The trip is roughly the distance between New York City and Chicago. Only it takes just 4.5 hours because the train goes over 200 miles per hour and there’s almost 100 of them going back and forth each day. The ride is so smooth, if you put a dime on the ledge next to your window — half on the ledge and half off — it will be there exactly as you left it from the beginning of the trip to the end. Try that on the Acela between New York City and Washington and the dime will be on the floor in two seconds after the train starts wobbling out of the station.
In case you missed the story, while I was in Beijing, General Motors took a write-down of more than $5 billion on the value of its once cutting-edge factory that at one time was a major player in the Chinese car market. Sales at G.M.’s China joint venture, SAIC-GM, “slumped 59 percent in the first 11 months of this year, to 370,989 units, while local new-energy vehicle champion BYD sold more than 10 times that number in the same period,” Reuters reported.
But don’t worry, folks, help is on the way. Trump has vowed to make America great again by doubling down on drill-baby-drill gas guzzlers and ending U.S. government subsidies for Americans who purchase electric cars.So, what do you think is going to happen? The rest of the world will gradually transition to Chinese-made self-driving E.V.s, “and America will become the new Cuba — the place where you visit to see old gas-guzzling cars that you drive yourself,” as Keith Bradsher, the Times Beijing bureau chief and an auto industry specialist, mused to me.
If that happens, one day we’ll wake up and China will own the global electric vehicle market. And since fully autonomous driving technology only really works with E.V.s, that means China will own the future — the self-driving-cars market as well.
Here’s another way the China that Trump will face in 2025 looks a lot different from his last go-round. If Trump were even to tell China, “Hey, I’ll let you off the hook on tariffs, if you build more factories in America,” that would definitely help reduce our trade deficit with Beijing, but it might not be such a vote-getter for Republicans. Because here is what China would say: “Sure, how many factories would you like? Forty? Fifty? But there’s one thing. The assembly lines will all be staffed by robots, and we can even operate them remotely.”
I learned a new term on this visit: “dark factory.” A retired Chinese official mentioned to me in passing over dinner that she wanted to buy a new high-tech bed and decided to go see the offerings at the factory. When she arrived, though, she found it was a “dark factory” — so the lights were turned on just for her. It wasn’t dark because it was out of business, she told me. It was dark because it was so fully roboticized that the company doesn’t waste electricity keeping the lights on for any humans — except for the engineers who come to clean or adjust the machines once a day.
As an article in the state-run China Daily explained: “From steel plates and mobile phones to household motors and rocket ignition device parts, more business lines in China are using artificial intelligence to power their production and have introduced ‘dark factories’ with their 24-hour uninterrupted and unattended production capabilities. Dark factories, also called smart factories, are entirely run by programmed robots with no need for lighting.”You remember the old joke? “The modern factory will be just a man and a dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the machines and the man will be there to feed the dog.” That is not a joke in China.
More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel. I love this account from a German travel vlogger from his Shanghai hotel experience, recounted recently by Global Times: “‘OK, so the phone is ringing. That means the robot is here,’ he said at the beginning of the video. When he opened the door, he saw a robot standing there waiting for him. When he pressed the ‘open’ button on the machine, the lid on the top opened to reveal the food he had ordered inside. He took out the package and hit ‘finished’ to close the compartment and watched the robot return to the elevator.”
No tip required.
But there is another reason for China’s headlong rush to robotization: demographic necessity. In America, strong trade unions and a growing population make robots the natural enemy of working people, because of how they supplant blue-collar labor. China’s population collapse and its heavy restrictions on trade unions make introducing more and more robots to factory floors both economically essential and politically easier (but China, too, will most likely face a backlash from its blue-collar workers).
In the last seven years alone, the number of babies born in China fell from 18 million to nine million. The latest projection is that China’s current population of 1.4 billion will decline by 100 million by 2050 and possibly by 700 million by the end of the century. To preserve its own standard of living and be able to take care of all its old people, with a steadily shrinking working population, China will drive the robotization of everything for itself — and the rest of the world.
In his first term, Trump — and Biden, too — was right to impose tariffs on China as long as it didn’t give us reciprocal access. China has consistently violated World Trade Organization trade rules to avoid giving reciprocal access to its major trading partners, and it has greatly subsidized its companies. I have complained about this for years. China has historically bought $1 from America for every $4 America bought from China; much of that is soybeans and other agricultural products.But here’s what’s scary: We no longer make that many things China wants to buy. It can do almost everything at least cheaper and often better.
Eric Chen is the founder of Kingwills, a Chinese materials science company that competes with, among others, DuPont. He explained to me that what young Chinese entrepreneurs like himself learned from the Chinese internet giants like Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba was “rapid innovation and improvement.” His foreign competitors, said Chen, upgrade their products much more slowly and, when they do, can take five or six years to build a new factory.
“We upgrade some products every 30 days. We can produce a new production line in six months. We learned from Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. You are really good” at taking products “from zero to 1. We are good at going from 2 to 100.”
This is possible because the steady buildup of manufacturing capacity in China means that virtually anything you need today — from a tiny part to a rare earth chemical — can be sourced domestically. No other country in the world has such a complete homegrown ecosystem, Chen explained, so any idea you come up with, “you can do all the sourcing from here. We have a three-year target to have zero labor for production and storage using a combination of robots and A.I.” Then “we can sit in China and control production outside of China. Then we can put factories closer to the customer.”
He added one warning, though: “Probably in the future the competition for the U.S. is not China, but A.I. It is coming for both of us.”Foreign business executives operating in China will tell you that you used to have to be there to have access to its giant market of consumers. You still have to be there, they say, but today it’s also in order to have access to China’s expanding market of innovators. Get ready for more “designed in China,” not just “made in China.”
We fool ourselves if we believe that China’s growing strength in advanced manufacturing is only from unfair trade practices. It is also because it has lots and lots of people still burning to work, as they say, “9-9-6” — that is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week to make a better life, and because Beijing has invested in world-class infrastructure, and because it deliberately suppresses consumer spending and because it has a seemingly endless supply of students majoring in engineering — and not so many in sports management, sociology and gender studies.
“The Chinese treat education like we treat sports,” said Han Shen Lin, who teaches at N.Y.U. Shanghai.
So, China’s going to bury us? That is not at all inevitable.
I left as impressed with China’s weaknesses as much as with its strengths. I don’t want to see instability in China. It’s important to the world that China continues to be able to give its 1.4 billion people a better life — but it cannot be at the expense of everyone else.
And it is clear to me from being there that, in the relative absence of foreign visitors, a lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world. As a senior White House official said to me, China “freaked out” the rest of the world when it began its “Made in China 2025” agenda — a state-led and -funded industrial policy that aimed to make China the dominant producer in every aspect of advanced manufacturing, from aerospace to material science to machine tools. And it’s not only freaking out more developed manufacturers, like the United States and Germany, but also developing countries like Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia, as they see China dominating overseas and yet still constricting its domestic consumption.China has billions and billions of dollars in domestic savings that could stimulate its economy, but people will spend those savings only if they have confidence in their government and faith in the future. But the government’s bad performance at the end of Covid shook that confidence, and the lack of transparency about China’s future direction has kept savers cautious.
Their reluctance to spend is compounded by youth unemployment stuck over 17 percent, as well as by seeing some cities so starved for cash that raiding parties of tax collectors are sent to track down tax evaders in other provinces. In addition, the persistent housing crisis, born of immense overbuilding, has left many Chinese feeling house-poor. It also doesn’t help confidence to read that China’s third consecutive serving or former defense minister is being investigated for alleged corruption in the People’s Liberation Army.
Most important, the government’s prioritizing of Communist Party ideology and state-owned industries is driving some of China’s most talented private-sector innovators to quietly move their money, families or themselves to Japan, Dubai and Singapore. That is not a good trend for China.
My free advice to my friends in China is that an economy this unbalanced is not sustainable. It will eventually generate a global trade alliance against them. The world will not let China make everything and only import soybeans and potatoes. China needs more nurses to provide good health care at home — and fewer engineers to design more cars for abroad. Its youth need more outlets for creative expression — without having to worry that a song lyric they write could land them in prison. I talked to too many people who feel choked or don’t dare speak their minds. They see the crackdown in Hong Kong. It was not like this 15 years ago. There is a reason so many educated young Chinese now yearn to go abroad.
As for my neighbors in America, I have a confession. I caught a virus in China that I never imagined I’d get: “Elon Musk appreciation.”
I’d become so disgusted with the way Musk had been using his X megaphone to bully defenseless people and fawn over Donald Trump that I just wanted that Elon Musk to shut up and go away. But there is another Elon Musk. The genius engineer-entrepreneur who can make stuff, big stuff — electric cars, reusable rockets and satellite internet systems — as well as anyone in China can, and often better.
Elon Musk at his best, though, is the one American manufacturer the Chinese fear and respect. It is crazy to me that Trump is wasting Musk on the project of shrinking the U.S. bureaucracy — under the acronym DOGE, for the informal “Department of Government Efficiency” — when he should be leading another DOGE, a government office for enabling more Americans to “Do Good Engineering.”
In sum, America needs to tighten up, but China needs to loosen up. Which is why my hat is off to Secretary of State Antony Blinken for showing China the way forward. On April 26, as Blinken was en route to the airport after a visit that included a meeting with China’s president, Xi Jinping, Reuters reported, he popped into the LiPi record store in the Chinese capital’s arts district.
Blinken bought two records — one was an album by the classic Chinese rocker Dou Wei. The other was Taylor Swift’s 2022 record “Midnights.” Swift’s “Lover” album in 2019 had more than one million combined streams, downloads and sales in China within a week of its release — a record for an international artist, the Reuters story noted.
The demand from Chinese consumers is there. I’d say it’s time for China’s leaders to let their people have more of the supply. It would be good for both our countries.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.
