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China’s Growth Poses Opportunity and RiskChina welcom

游客2024-02-23  12
问题                           China’s Growth Poses Opportunity and Risk
China welcoming foreign companies and investment
    When Japan, at the highest point of its economic power, built a huge airport in Osaka in the late 1980s, it caused a seven-year trade battle with the United States over the nearly complete exclusion of non-Japanese companies from the project.
    China, the rising star of Asia after Japan,  is now completing its own immense airport in Guangzhou, the commercial canter of prosperous southeastern China. But the Chinese are going about it differently.
    U.S. companies designed the terminal, its air-conditioning system and the flight information system. A German company engineered the vaulting roof, a Danish company produced the boarding gates and a Ditch company built the check-in counters. And the modern air traffic control tower was designed by a company from Singapore.
    The welcome that China is offering to multinational companies and foreign investment has left many Western business executives, so critical of a closed Japan a decade or so ago, enthusiastically embracing China, its cheap work force and its huge markets.
China posing an even greater challenge
    But that same openness--combined with China’ s vast population of 1.3 billion and its military force--makes it an even greater long-term economic challenge to the United States than Japan seemed to be in the 1980s, according to a growing number of executives, economists and officials.
    While the Chinese economy is still about one-third the size of Japan’ s, the potential size of its market has made it very hard for companies to say "no" when Beijing officials demand that they build factories in China, reveal the latest technology or adopt Chinese technical standards.
    Japan has effectively run out of low-wage workers for its industries, and quickly brought much of its economy up to and, in some cases, beyond Western technological standards. China still has vast reserves of cheap labor in inland areas and many backward industries that can grow swiftly as they copy Western and Japanese methods.
    "China could do what Japan did, as a very fast follower, but China could do it bigger and better and for a longer period of time," said Steven Weber, an Asia scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. "It’s not necessarily as vulnerable(脆弱的) as Japan was."
    But while the danger posed by Japan to other economies over the last decade has been in the form of economic stagnation (停滞) and political weakness, China poses the risk of fast, sharp shocks.
    Its change from a planned economy to a form of market economy seems to make it especially responsive to economic ups and downs,  and Chinese officials have begun worrying that an unsustainable (不可持续的) economic bubble(泡沫) is developing. At the same time, China’s one-party  system may struggle to adapt to the social tensions brought to the surface by rapid economic development.
    Enthusiasts see it overcoming the obstacles.
    "Once China passes the high growth, it will have the bursting of the bubble," said Eisuke Sakakibara, former Japanese vice minister of finance for international affairs. "But that will happen in 20 years. China is Japan of the 1960s."
Growing anxiety among Americans
    Like the challenge posed by Japan a generation ago, China’s strength draws growing attention in American politics. Senator John Edwards has become the main challenger to Senator John Kerry for the Democratic presidential nomination(提名) by emphasizing job losses to trade, especially trade with China; Kerry says he and Edwards essentially agree on trade questions.
    The Bush administration over the last year has tried to relieve worries about job losses by talking tough with the Chinese---in particular, demanding that China let the exchange value of its currency float upward to raise the price of its exports. But it has also continued to assert its faith in a policy of free trade.
    China’s strengths are indeed impressive. Its wage advantage is much greater than Japan’s was a decade or two ago. China has the diplomatic force not to give in to foreign pressure. And its opening to foreign investment brings China both the latest technology and the overseas corporate connections that help it fight restrictions on its exports.
    For all these reasons, the Chinese trade surplus (顺差) with the United States has soared, increasing five times in the last decade to $124 billion in 2003. By comparison, Japan’ s surplus did not quite increase three times in the decade when its economy aroused the most anxiety among Americans. And in the last decade it has leveled off, at $ 66 billion last year.
China’s biggest competitive advantage
    China’s biggest competitive advantage -- its immense and low-paid work force -- is in view here in the southeast, at places like the air-conditioned BBK Electronics factory in Dongguan, a two-hour drive from the new Guangzhou airport.
    Sun and Du are migrants working in BBk Electronic factory in Donguan (广东东莞市). Like most of the workers in the factory, they have taken a 30-hour ride aboard slow trains from their poor village in north-central China. Each earns $ 60 to $ 75 a month, too little by U. S. standards but a lot in rural China, where 200 million people live on less than $1 a day.
    "There is nothing to do at home," Sun said. "I come here to learn to do more myself."
    She and Du live in factory dormitories and say they rarely dare to go out. But the women express the same excitement, in almost the same words, about having come even to a smoggy city like Dongguan.
    "I want to see the outside world," Du said.
    China has 10 times the population of Japan, with more unemployed adults in rural areas than the entire U.S. work force~ Raising the wages of so many people to the levels found in industrial nations will take a long time.
The biggest question facing China
    The biggest question facing China is how vulnerable (脆弱)it remains to acute setbacks --a banking failure, an inflationary spiral, even a temporary economic depression. Citing overcapacity and excessive investment in some sectors of the economy, the Chinese central bank warned recently that "we really cannot be optimistic about the situation of inflation." A crack in the economy could shake governments across East Asia that have tied their economies to China’ s, warns Ajay Kapur, a strategist in Hong Kong with Salomon Smith Barney.
A parable
    For a parable (比喻) about economies that seem as if they could prosper indefinitely, Chinese officials need look no further than to Osaka and its huge airport. The artificial island on which it was built a few years ago is slowly sinking into the Pacific. [br] In the opinion of Eisuke Sakakibara, China’s economic bubble will burst in three decades.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案 B
解析 细节题。根据文章第12段的相关内容，有关日本人认为所谓的中国经济泡沫会在20年后破灭，而不是30年后，因此答案是[N]。
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