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纽约时报写的一篇关于中国经济走向的文章（有译文） - [看看]
2011-03-29
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http://myspace602.blogbus.com/logs/112669457.html
When the Wuqi International Hotel was completed this spring, it immediately dominated the modest skyline of Wuqi, a small city in north central China. The hotel stands 21 stories tall and is wrapped in gleaming gray metal, with two glass elevators running up the outside. On a recent stay there, I had a clear view of the nearby mountains from my 19th-floor room.
当今年春天吴起国际饭店落成时，它立刻决定着朴实外表的吴起市，这是个位于中国中北部的小城市。这个饭店20层，镶嵌着闪着微光的金属，外面有着两个玻璃的电梯。在吴起县待了一段时间，长住19楼，我已经将附近的小山看得清清楚楚。
The hotel is part of an effort by local officials to reshape their city in ways that many economists, both inside and outside China, have been recommending for the country as a whole. The government of Wuqi (pronounced, roughly, Wu-tzi) offers more generous health insurance to its citizens than many places. Its schools are free all the way through high school, rather than through only ninth grade, as is usual in China, and have been the subject of admiring stories in the Chinese media. Over the last decade, the city has embarked on an ambitious tree-planting program that has brought green to the yellow-brown hills of the Loess Plateau, where Wuqi is located. The Communists ended their Long March in those hills in 1935, and the Wuqi International Hotel is meant to host tourists who come for this history.
当地政府付出努力将这个饭店建成，以作为重塑城市形象，这也是国内外经济学家为这个国家所提出的建议。吴起县政府为市民们提供了比许多地方都好的医疗保险。在吴起县，所有孩子上大学之前都享受免费教育，而中国大部分地区是实行九年义务教育，这也是中国媒体引以为豪的事件。在过去的几十年中，吴起县一直致力于将黄土高原上的荒山变成绿林。1935年中国共产党结束长征于此地，吴起县政府也是想建立国际饭店来接待这些“红色旅游”的客人们。
The larger idea is to build a more sustainable economy, or what Chinese leaders have called a balanced and harmonious society. In that economy, families would not have to save 20 percent of their income in order to pay for schooling and medical care, as many do now. They would instead be able to afford more of the comforts of modern life — better housing, clothing, transportation and communication. In time, China would become the world’s next great consumer society.
吴起县更大的想法是建立可持续发展的经济，套用官方的语言是构建和谐社会。可持续发展的经济可以让人们不用像现在一样存上20%的收入来支付教育和医疗的费用。这些费用可以用来支付更好舒适的生活—更好的住房、衣物、交通、通讯。届时，中国将变成世界上下一个消费大国。
That term may have negative connotations in the United States, particularly after the last decade of debt excess. But the term means something very different for China. A Chinese consumer society would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The benefits of the industrial boom that began in the 1980s would spread more rapidly beyond the country’s eastern coast. The service sector would grow, and the economy would no longer be quite so dependent on smoke-spewing factories.
消费这个词在美国可能含有一些贬义，特别是过去那负债累累的几十年中，但是这个词在中国意义却截然不同。在中国，消费可以提升许多人的生活水平。工业化兴起的好处开始于1980年，并在中国的东部地区迅速显现。现在第三产业不断发展，经济将不再依靠于制造业。
For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, millions — could end up with jobs that exist, at least in part, to design, make or sell goods and services to China. This possibility helps explain why Democrats, Republicans, economists, business consultants, corporate executives and labor leaders all devote so much time to urging China to consume more. One subtext of the recent G-20 meeting in Seoul was the encouragement of Chinese consumption.
中国的消费对于世界上其他国家来说，已经是未来经济发展中最大的希望。过去的几年，当美国、欧洲、日本别无选择只好减少消费以缓解债务，此时中国却反其道而行之。许多美国人失去了他们的工作，他们的工作就是设计、制造或者卖出东西及服务给中国。正是出于这种情况，民主党、共和党、经济学家、商业顾问、公司高管、工会领袖费时费力督促中国刺激消费。韩国首尔举办的G20的一个潜台词就是鼓励中国消费。
What’s striking about Wuqi is just how serious its officials are about making this transition happen — and yet how difficult it nonetheless will be. The Wuqi International Hotel was as comfortable as most Marriotts or Hiltons in the United States, but the surrounding streets had the dusty feel of a backwater. The hardware, liquor and food stores down the block were each the size of a storage closet and about as well lighted. In the evenings, when Wuqi residents gathered in a public square to talk or perform exercises together, many of the stores were closed. The parents I met were thrilled that high school was free but were still saving an enormous portion of their modest incomes to pay for college or a new home. Those savings create a self-reinforcing cycle, in which stores don’t flourish because people don’t shop much and people don’t shop much partly because there aren’t many good stores. As Feng Zhendong, Wuqi’s reform-minded Communist Party secretary, says, “There’s only so much to spend on.”
困扰着吴起县政府的是，要让人们的消费发生这么大的变化是一件十分困难的事，无论现在还是将来。吴起县的国际饭店其舒适程度不亚于万豪酒店或者希尔顿饭店，但其周边环境却如死水一般。街上许多五金、烟酒、副食店一间一间的，白天营业，到了晚上，当吴起县许多居民聚集于大广场聊天或者锻炼时，那些店都关门打烊了。我遇到的父母们，他们很高兴现在高中都免费了，但他们依然将大部分收入用来支付大学的费用或者购买一套新的房子。人们这种储蓄方式会让经济循环更小，由于人们不会更多地去消费所以不会出现更多的商场，反过来一定程度没有更好的商场，人们也就更不会去消费。吴起县的一个颇具改革意识的秘书长说，“我们只有这么一些可以利用了。”
Then there was the hotel itself. During my first night there, I don’t think I saw a single other guest — in the lobby, the restaurant, the elevator or on the 19th floor. After I used the hotel gym, the front desk called to ask if I would be using it the next morning as well. In that case, someone would make sure it was unlocked.
他说的可能就是饭店了。我入住的第一个晚上，我没有看到其他的客人，在休息大厅、餐厅、电梯还是我住的19层。当我用了一次健身中心后，前台给我打电话问我明天早上是否还用，这样的话，管理的人员就可以不上锁了。
No one believes the Chinese economy will transform itself overnight. But how long will it take and how difficult will it be? Preoccupied with our own economic insecurity, Americans may well be underestimating the challenges — and fears — of their new rival.
没有人相信中国的经济可以一夜之间发生变化，但是这要多长时间，这种转化会遇到多大困难。当我们经济提前加载了不安全的因素，美国依旧低估了挑战和他们新的竞争对手。
The rise of China can often seem inevitable. It is the world’s most populous country, now reclaiming its long-lost power. Its economy recently passed Japan’s as the second-biggest in the world, leaving economists to debate whether China was on pace to overtake the United States by the year 2025 or 2030. Yet China’s rise has been anything but inevitable. Consider other poor countries — in South America, Africa and even Asia — with vast pools of cheap labor, which nonetheless have not been able to grow rapidly. Or consider other once-socialist countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, still suffering from a post-Soviet hangover. Even look at India, which is often paired with China as the great growth story of modern times. As recently as 1990, India had a comparable per-capita income to China. Today, China’s is more than twice as high. So having a lot of cheap labor or moving toward a market system, or even both, does not guarantee the phenomenal growth China has experienced.
中国的崛起经常被认为是不可避免的。作为世界上人口最多的国家，它重新焕发了迷失已久的活力。中国的经济总量最近超过了日本，成为世界上第二大经济体，现在经济学家正在讨论2025或者2030年，中国是否会超过美国，是的，中国的发展不可避免。对比其他贫穷的国家，如南美国家、非洲国定、亚洲其他国家，他们同样有着大量的廉价劳动力，但他们却无力快速发展。同样对比一些东欧社会主义国家，这些国家至今还深受后社会主义的影响。再来看看印度，1990年还被视为将来可与中国相匹配，但现在中国的发展速度是前者的两倍。虽然同样拥有大量廉价劳动力或者建立市场经济，但这不能保证他们获得和中国一样的发展速度。
That growth — among the most rapid in human history — has been a result of strategy and good fortune. The Maoist period was brutal and repressive, but despite the terrible famines and the Cultural Revolution’s assault on education, China did emerge with an unusually literate and healthy population for a poor country. Toward the end of that period, even before the one-child policy, a baby boom ended, creating a relatively small group of children and elderly to be supported by a large group of able workers. Into this fertile economic ground, Deng Xiaoping and his fellow reformers planted the seeds of a market evolution. Workers gained an incentive to succeed, while central planners, unconstrained by democracy, made the investments to turn China into the world’s factory.
这种发展速度，在人类历史上，被视为策略和运气的结合体。毛泽东时代粗暴和压制，虽然经历了自然灾害和文化大革命，但在这个贫穷的国度，依然出现了有文化和健康的一代人。当这个时代结束之时，中国实行了计划生育，这就出现了家中老人小孩少，却有许多可在工厂劳作的中生代。在这个富饶的基础上，中国的领导人邓小平和他的同事们开始播撒下市场经济的种子。工人被多劳多得所激励，而国家的规划者，已经可以不大受政治上的束缚，让投资将中国变成的世界的工场
This model is part of something that has been called the Beijing Consensus, and it is understandably appealing to other poor countries. Yet in many respects it is not new. Politics aside, China’s story is the classic one of economic development: investments in physical capital and education make a society more productive and are combined with a huge shift of people from farms to factories. England, Germany, the United States, Japan and South Korea have all followed the model over the last 250 years. The economist Gregory Clark, author of “A Farewell to Alms,” calls it the only story of economic development.
这种模式，某种意义上，我们称之为北京的声音，同时这也于同样贫穷的其他国家来说，是富有吸引力的。但这种模式从其他方面来说，它不是一个新生儿。不从政治这个层面来说，中国的故事仅是经济发展中的一个经典案例而已：进行投资，抓住教育使这个社会更丰产，同时将农村人口迁到工厂里面。英国、德国、美国、日本、南韩，这些国家，250年来都是这种发展模式。经济学家格雷戈里· 克拉克在他的《告别施舍》一书中称，这仅仅是经济发展中的一个故事而已。
And this same story explains why China’s continued rise is no more inevitable than its recent rise. From far away, China may look like an unstoppable colossus. From the inside, it looks more vulnerable. Indeed, Chinese economists, business executives and Communist Party officials are debating, sometimes passionately, just how vulnerable it is. “In the short and medium term, there should be no problem,” says Yu Yongding, a prominent economist. Among other things, the government has built up enough savings to spend its way out of most problems over the next several years. “But there are fundamental contradictions in the Chinese economy. We can waste our strengths in one or two decades. If we exhaust these strengths, then we’ll be in a big trouble.”
同时这个故事也解释了为什么中国过去持续高速发展。过去，中国就像一个永不停息的巨人。但从中国经济的内部来看，它实际上还是很脆弱的，中国的经济学字、商层高管们以及共产党的官员们一直就中国经济的脆弱程度争论着，有时还很激烈。一位主流经济学家说，中短期来说，中国经济不存在问题，因为中国政府正提高银行储备，以应对将来的问题，但是中国的经济存在基础性的矛盾，经济发展的活力将在10-20年内被耗尽，那时中国的经济将面临巨大的困难。
To continue growing rapidly, China needs to make the next transition, from sweatshop economy to innovation economy. This transition is the one that has often proved difficult elsewhere. Once a country has turned itself into an export factory, it cannot keep growing by repeating the exercise. It can’t move a worker from an inefficient farm to a modern factory more than once. It cannot even retain its industrial might forever. As a country industrializes, workers will demand their share of the bounty, as has started happening in China, and some factories will start moving to poorer countries. Eventually, a rising economy needs to take two crucial steps: manufacture goods that aren’t just cheaper than the competition, but better; and create a thriving domestic market, so that its own consumers can pick up the slack when exports inevitably slow. These steps go hand in hand. Big consumer markets become laboratories where companies know that innovations will be tested and the successful ones richly rewarded. Those products can then expand into countries with less mature consumer markets. Look at the telephone, the personal computer and the iPhone and iPad, all of which were designed in the United States and are now sold around the world.
为了持续快速发展，中国将需要对经济进行第二次转换，要从现在的血汗工厂的经济模式转换成创新型的经济模式。这种转换在世界上其他国家被证明很困难。一旦一个国家以出口为主导，它就不可能通过不断重复来保持经济的增长，因为现在不可能简单地将低效率的农场工人转移到现代化企业，就可以直接进行生产，如同原来将农民转移到工厂一样。国家工业化的过程中，工人会要求更高的收入，这些在中国已经出现了，导致一些工厂转移到更为贫穷的国家。最终，一个持续发展的国家，其经济要走关键的两步：产品不再以价格而以质量竞争；更繁荣的国内市场，当出口减缓时，国内市场可给予有力支持。这两步环环相扣。大的消费市场会成为产品的试验室，公司可以将自己的创新在市场得到检验，成功者将得到极大的尊重，其产品也可以输出到一些市场程度稍低的国家。我们看看，电话、个人计算机、iPhone和 iPad，所有这些都在美国被设计制造，但却在全球销售。
Today’s China cannot claim any such achievement, a fact that weighs on Chinese policymakers. They worry about the country’s ability to innovate and, in particular, about the quality of its education system. When I met with Guo Shuqing, a party official and the chairman of China Construction Bank, in his office high above Beijing’s financial district, he mentioned that a recent ranking of the world’s top 100 universities included 53 from the United States but just three from mainland China. Even those numbers, Guo said, probably overstated the strengths of China’s universities: “In terms of innovation — really original, creative ideas — they’re very weak,” he told me. By contrast, the American education system helped make possible Google and other companies.
现在的中国不能说已经取得了上述的成就，这也是当前决策者制订政策一个因素。他们也在考虑国家是否有能力进行创新，某种意义上是对教育质量的忧虑。当我遇到建设银行的主席，在他位于金融街的办公室，他提到近来世界前100名大学的排名，美国有53所，而中国大陆仅有3所，就是这3所大学，他也说可能是高估了这些大学的能力。他说，从创新的角度来说，真正原始的有创意的概念，这些学校还是比较缺乏。与之对比，美国的教育体系决定了google和其他公司出现的可能性。
Clearly, many of China’s weaknesses can be ascribed to its stage of development. Yet there is no iron law that it will reach the next stage. Japan and the Soviet Union, in different ways, both failed to make the transition to an innovation economy. While they may seem like unimpressive comparisons today, they once occupied a position much like China’s. They were rising powers that appeared to have found a new model for growth. In a 1994 essay in Foreign Affairs, Paul Krugman, the economist who is now a New York Times columnist, pointed out that Americans were then talking about Japan and the so-called East Asian tigers in ways remarkably similar to how they had talked about the Soviet bloc in the 1960s. “Once upon a time,” he wrote, “Western opinion leaders found themselves both impressed and frightened by the extraordinary growth rates achieved by a set of Eastern economies.”
现在，我们将中国的弱点归结于其发展的阶段，然而没有一个定律表明中国一定会走到下一个阶段。日本和前苏联，虽然发展模式不一样，但是最终倒在向创新型社会发展的路上。虽然今天他们与其他国家相比不是那么明显，但是当年他们占据着像中国现在一样的地位，那时他们发展中显现的能量就好像在其发展模式前所未有。克鲁格曼，这位经济学家，现在纽约时报的专栏作家，1994年写了一篇外国事务的文章，他指出，“现在美国与日本对话，同时称之为东亚老虎，这和1960年美国称苏联为社会主义集团极为相似。”文中，他还写道，西方国家被东方国家的发展，这种异于自己的发展模式感到惊讶与恐惧。
The Soviet Union, of course, utterly failed to take the next steps. Japan did nurture some of the world’s most successful exporters, like Sony and Toyota, and developed just-in-time manufacturing processes that were widely copied. But its domestic market remains sheltered and inefficient, especially in the service sector, which has held back growth and innovation. Japan has not merely slowed down, as is inevitable when countries get richer; it has become a global symbol of economic mismanagement. These troubles seem directly relevant to China, given that China, too, has protected much of its domestic economy from competition.
前苏联最终没有走到下一步。而日本确实培育了几个世界知名的企业，如索尼和丰田，并且发展了“准时制生产”模式，这些模式在过去被其他企业大量使用。但是日本的国内市场依旧不开放且低效，特别是服务行业，这极大限制增长速度和创新。所以当其他国家变富裕后，日本的衰退已经是必然的结果，它也成为全球经济处置不当的一个“榜样”。这些问题与中国息息相关，中国也同样保护国内市场，使之远离竞争。
The United States, for all of our current problems, is still easily the world’s largest economy, which is partly because we made the transition from an industrial economy to a consumer economy. Income in the United States remains about 30 percent higher than in Germany or England on a per-capita basis, 40 percent higher than in Japan and more than six times as high as in China.
美国，虽然现在面临着问题，但依旧是世界最大的经济体，这部分程度上是因为美国已经完成了经济模式的转换，从工业化经济转换到消费型经济。美国国民收入比英国或者德国高30%，比日本高40%，是中国的6倍多。
China does have advantages that other countries did not, starting with its size. But it still will not find the transition easy. A consumer economy revolves around individual choice, and Beijing’s authoritarian government is often hostile to the idea of choice. The government is also filled with many officials who have known only industrial-led growth — and have benefited from it — and who are at least as influential as the economic reformers preaching the virtues of domestic consumption. These reformers will have to persuade their colleagues to step back from the most aggressive industrialization any country has ever undertaken. China now spends about 50 percent of its gross domestic product on a broad category economists call investment — roads, bridges, trains, ports, technology, factories and office buildings. That is the highest share in recorded history. During their great booms in the 1960s and ’70s, Japan and South Korea never topped 40 percent. China itself was spending 35 percent only a decade ago.
中国依旧有着其他国家没有的优势，那就是它的经济规模，但这不会让它的经济模式转换容易。消费型的经济取决于个人的选择，而北京当局对这种模式比较敌对。政府中有许多官员，有一些人只知道工业经济的发展，并从中受益，而另一些人，他们被视为有影响力的经济改革者，一直力主国内市场拉动消费的好处。这些经济改革者将建议他的同事们从许多国家正经历的工业化撤退。中国的GDP的50%来自于经常学家所谓的投资，如公路、桥梁、铁路、港口、技术、工厂和办公大楼，这是史上最高的比例。1960年日本、1970年的韩国这些方面从来没有超过40%，而十年前的中国没有超过35%。
Already, there are signs that China is bumping up against the limits of its industrial revolution. Other countries are frustrated with its growing share of exports and are pressing China to raise the value of its currency, the renminbi. And the demographic wind that has been at China’s back is on the verge of switching direction, leaving the country with fewer workers and more retirees. Without a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor, companies will have to raise wages, which — like a higher renminbi — would make Chinese exports less competitive. Even before the demographic trends put pressure on pay, this year’s strikes at a Honda plant in Guangdong Province, among other factories, led some companies to lift wages more than 20 percent. Twenty-eight provincial governments increased their minimum wage between 12 percent and 32 percent.
现在已经有迹象显示中国正在冲突经济中的一些限制，其他国家不满自己的出口比例，正施压中国提高人民币的兑换利率。中国现在越来越少的工人和越来越多的退休人员。由于无法得到更多廉价劳动力，公司不得不提高员工工资，如同人民币的汇率一样，这将导致中国的出口的竞争力进一步减弱。在统计数据显示要提高个人待遇之前，广州本田已经发生了罢工事件，这一事件同时让一些公司提高员工工资20%。28个省提高最低工资，幅度达12-32%。
Perhaps the most telling sign that China’s economic model is reaching its limits is a decline in its efficiency. To maintain 10 percent annual economic growth, it has had to invest more and more in roads, buildings and the like. In other words, the return on its investments has begun to fall, which is never a good sign. “We’ve got a problem,” Guo, the bank chairman, told me. “We realize this kind of growth is not sustainable. It’s not the kind of problem like a financial crisis. But if such inefficiencies accumulate for quite a long time, you reach the point where, suddenly, maybe things burst.”
一个显著的标识说明中国的经济模式正达到它的极限，许多经济刺激模式越来越失去其有效性。为了保持年度10%的增长率，政府不得不更多投资于公路和建筑物等类似的方面。换而言之，一旦当投资回报或者效果开始下落时，这就不是一个很好的现象。银行主席告诉我说，我们确实遇到的问题，但这不是经济危机那类问题。但是如果这种无效刺激维系时间一长，那就确实会出现大问题。
During my recent stay in China, I came away, as many Westerners do, awed by the country’s accomplishments. Cities have sprouted from nothing, allowing peasants to leap a century of economic history in a decade. Rural areas have highways that are smoother than in many major American cities. One bullet train I took could cover the distance between New York and Washington in an hour. The United States is on course to have such a train approximately never.
在中国的这段日子里，我和许多西方人一样，去过许多其他的城市，被这个国家所取得的成就所震惊。城市一夜之间拔地而起，十年间农民也发生了翻天覆地的变化。一些农村的高速路甚至比美国一些大城市更畅通。我做过一次高铁，大概纽约到华盛顿的距离，只用了一个小时。美国这种火车还在计划之中。
But once you start to notice the signs of unsustainability, you start seeing them everywhere. Some highways are strangely empty. So are some buildings. When I tagged along with a group of American businessmen on a tour of what we thought was a new energy-efficient office building in Hangzhou, a coastal city a couple of hours south of Shanghai, we soon realized that it was — hard as such a thing may be to imagine — a sample office building. It had been built to show potential investors what their business might look like if it moved to Hangzhou.
但是当你开始注意到不可持续的迹象时，你就明了一切。有一些高速公路很奇怪空空如也，一些建筑物也如此。当我和一个美国商务团去杭州（一个位于上海南部，只有几个小时路的海滨城市）考察一种新能效的办公楼，我们很快意识到我们看到的只是一个样板楼，虽然这对我们来说很难想像。但是这个楼的建设仅是向潜在的投资者显示他们的业务在杭州开展的情况。
This unsustainability is especially pronounced in the current real estate mania. Housing prices have been soaring, despite government efforts to cool the market. Relative to rents, housing prices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou are higher than they were in most any American city at the peak of our housing bubble. In Beijing or Shanghai, four or five different real estate agencies might open on a single block. Other agents simply set up shop on the sidewalk, with a table and brochures. At traffic lights in Beijing, young men walk among the idling cars and hand out brochures for newly built apartments.
这种不可持续性只是说明了现在地产业的狂热。房价高涨，虽然政府一直致力于控制房价。北京、上海、杭州的租金和房价比大多数美国城市在房地产泡沫时期的峰值还要高。在北京或者上海，一个街区可能会有4-5家地产中介开张。更有一些中介就在人行道，搭个桌子放些手册就开始营业。在北京的红绿灯处，一些年轻人穿梭于车辆之间，散发一些新开盘的公寓的宣传单。
It is true that an economy growing as rapidly as China’s can catch up to many of its excesses. But it will probably need to change to do so. Wages will have to rise faster, and people will have to spend more of their income. Otherwise, many infrastructure projects will end up resembling make-work, and house prices will fall. Banks and the government will then be saddled with bad loans, exhausting the fiscal strength that Yu and other economists see as China’s biggest advantage.
中国经济的快速发展可能可以消耗掉其过度生产的部分。但是将来，中国还是有必要对其发展方式作一些改变。工资将来不得不更快地增加，同时人们将来不得不花费更多份额地个人收入。另外，许多基础建设将不再成为提供就业机会的工程，房价也将会回落。银行和政府将承担大量的恶性债务，这将消耗中国的经济活力，而这些经济活力被Yu和其他经济学家视为中国最大的优势。
None of this means China is on the verge of running out of steam. It probably has at least 5 or 10 years of rapid growth ahead, even if it simply doubles down on its current growth strategy, because it can still take more industrial market share from other countries. In a way, though, the country’s short-term strengths in manufacturing and exporting may be another reason to wonder what the future holds. Those strengths will make it harder for China to summon the urgency to remake itself.
我说这些不是说中国已经发展无力了，可能未来有5-10年的快速发展期，甚至还有可能受益于现在的发展策略，因为中国仍然占据其他国家更多的工业市场份额。从某种程度来说，中国的制造业和出口的短期状况可能成为控制其经济发展导向的另一个原因，未来这两者很难重塑中国的经济。
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