2007.07中国制造，世界接受

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GLOBAL
China Makes, The World Takes
A look inside the world’s manufacturing center shows that America should welcome China’s rise—for now.

By James Fallows
JULY/AUGUST 2007 ISSUE
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CONTAINERS READY FOR SHIPMENT from the port of Shenzhen
From Atlantic Unbound:



Slideshow: "Made in China"
James Fallows narrates photos from the heart of the Chinese manufacturing dynamo.
Half the time I have spent in China I have spent in factories. At least that’s how it feels—and it’s a feeling I sought. The factories where more than 100 million Chinese men and women toil, and from which cameras, clothes, and every other sort of ware flow out to the world, are to me the most startling and intense aspect of today’s China. For now, they are also the most important. They are startling above all in their scale. I was prepared for the skyline of Shanghai and its 240-mph Maglev train to the airport, and for the nonstop construction, dust, and bustle of Beijing. Every account of modern China mentions them. But I had no concept of the sweep of what has become the world’s manufacturing center: the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province (the old Canton region), just north of Hong Kong. That one province might have a manufacturing workforce larger than America’s. Statistics from China are largely guesses, but Guangdong’s population is around 90 million. If even one-fifth of its people hold manufacturing jobs, as seems likely in big cities, that would be 18 million—versus 14 million in the entire United States.


One facility in Guangdong province, the famous Foxconn works, sits in the middle of a conurbation just outside Shenzhen, where it occupies roughly as much space as a major airport. Some 240,000 people (the number I heard most often; estimates range between 200,000 and 300,000) work on its assembly lines, sleep in its dormitories, and eat in its company cafeterias. I was told that Foxconn’s caterers kill 3,000 pigs each day to feed its employees. The number would make sense—it’s one pig per 80 people, in a country where pigs are relatively small and pork is a staple meat (I heard no estimate for chickens). From the major ports serving the area, Hong Kong and Shenzhen harbors, cargo ships left last year carrying the equivalent of more than 40 million of the standard 20-foot-long metal containers that end up on trucks or railroad cars. That’s one per second, round the clock and year-round—and it’s less than half of China’s export total. What’s in the containers that come back from America? My guess was, “dollars”; in fact, the two leading ship-borne exports from the United States to China, by volume, are scrap paper and scrap metal, for recycling.

And the factories are important, for China and everyone else. Someday China may matter internationally mainly for the nature of its political system or for its strategic ambitions. Those are significant even now, of course, but China’s success in manufacturing is what has determined its place in the world. Most of what has been good about China over the past generation has come directly or indirectly from its factories. The country has public money with which to build roads, houses, and schools—especially roads. The vast population in the countryside has what their forebears acutely lacked, and peasants elsewhere today still do: a chance at paying jobs, which means a chance to escape rural poverty. Americans complain about cheap junk pouring out of Chinese mills, but they rely on China for a lot that is not junk, and whose cheap price is important to American industrial and domestic life. Modern consumer culture rests on the assumption that the nicest, most advanced goods—computers, audio systems, wall-sized TVs—will get cheaper year by year. Moore’s Law, which in one version says that the price of computing power will be cut in half every 18 months or so, is part of the reason, but China’s factories are a big part too.

Much of what is threatening about today’s China also comes from its factories. Many people inside China, and nearly everyone outside, can avoid the direct effects of the country’s political controls. It is much harder to avoid its pollution. The air in Chinese cities is worse than I expected, and because the pollution affects so many people in such a wide range of places, it is more damaging than London’s, Manchester’s, or Pittsburgh’s in their worst, rapidly industrializing days. The air pollution comes directly from the steel works, cement plants, and other heavy-industry facilities that are helping the country prosper, and indirectly from the electric power plants that keep everything running. (Plus more and more cars, though China still has barely one-thirtieth as many per capita as the United States.) The sheer speed and volume with which factories and power plants across China increase their output of soot and gases make the country’s air-pollution problems the world’s. The heightened competition for oil, ore, and other commodities to feed the factories affects other nations, as do slapdash standards of food purity and safety, which may have led to tainted worldwide supplies of animal food. The ultimate fear in the developed world, of course, is that as China creates millions of new factory jobs unknown millions will lose such jobs in America, Canada, Germany, even Japan.

But these factories are both surprising and important in a less obvious, though also fundamental, way. Almost nothing about the way they work corresponds to the way they are discussed in the United States. America’s political debates about the “China opportunity” and, even more, the “China threat” seem distant, theoretical, and imprecise from the perspective of the factories where the outsourcing and exporting occur. The industrialists from the United States, Europe, or Japan who are deciding how much of their production to move to China talk about the process in very different terms from those used in American political discussion. One illustration: The artificially low value of China’s currency, relative to the dollar, comes near the top of American complaints about Chinese trade policy. (The currency is the yuan renminbi—literally, “people’s money”—or RMB). This is more like the eighth or tenth issue that comes up when business officials discuss the factories they are opening in one country and closing in another. And when it does come up, the context is usually whether the RMB’s rise will force a company to put its next factory not in China’s crowded coastal region but someplace with even lower costs, like the remote interior provinces, where salaries are lower and commercial space is cheaper—or perhaps Vietnam or Cambodia.

So too with complaints about Chinese government subsidies for exporting industries, widespread abuse of intellectual property, and even “slave labor” inside the vast factories. Some of these complaints are well-founded, others are not; but even if all were true, they would misdescribe and undervalue what is going on here. Talking about Chinese industrial growth, Americans are in the position of 19th-century Europeans who acted as if America’s industrial rise could be explained simply by its vast natural resources and its exploitation of immigrant and slave labor, plus its very casual attitude toward copyright and patent laws protecting foreign, mainly British, books and inventions. (Today, Americans walk the streets of China and see their movies, music, software, and books sold everywhere in cheap pirate versions. A century and a half ago, Charles Dickens walked the streets of young America and fumed to see his novels in cheap pirate versions.) All those factors played their part, but they were not the full story of America’s rise—nor do the corresponding aspects of modern China’s behavior fully explain what China has achieved.

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I can’t pretend to know the complete story of China’s industrial rise. But I can describe what I have seen, and the main way it has changed my mind.

Large-scale shifts in economic power have effects beyond the purely economic. Americans need not be hostile toward China’s rise, but they should be wary about its eventual effects. The United States is the only nation with the scale and power to try to set the terms of its interaction with China rather than just succumb. So starting now, Americans need to consider the economic, environmental, political, and social goals they care about defending as Chinese influence grows.

The consideration might best start from the point about which I’ve changed my mind: So far, America’s economic relationship with China has been successful and beneficial—and beneficial for both sides. Free trade may not always be good for all participants, and in the long run trade with China may hold perils for the United States. But based on what I have seen in China, and contrary to what I expected before I came, so far it is working as advertised. Before thinking about what should be changed, Americans should appreciate what has gone right. A good place to begin that story is Shenzhen.

Photos by Michael Christopher Brown
How it works: The view from the Four Points
Each time I went to breakfast at the Sheraton Four Points in Shenzhen, I felt as if I were in a movie. I had a specific scene in mind: the moments aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier in a typical World War II movie when the flight crews gather in the wardroom to discuss the mission on which they’re about to embark.

The morning crowd at the Four Points has that same sort of anticipatory buzz. Shenzhen, which is the part of China immediately north of Hong Kong and its “New Territories,” did not exist as a city as recently as Ronald Reagan’s time in the White House. It was a fishing town of 70,000 to 80,000 people, practically unnoticeable by Chinese standards. Today’s other big coastal manufacturing centers, such as Xiamen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, were for centuries consequential Chinese cities. Not Shenzhen. Its population has grown at least a hundredfold in the past 25 years—rather than merely tripled or quadrupled, as in other cities. It is roughly as populous as New York, like many Chinese cities I keep coming across. Shenzhen has scores of skyscrapers and many, many hundreds of factories.

The story of Shenzhen’s boom is in a sense the first chapter in modern China’s industrialization. “During the founding period, Shenzhen people were bold and resolute in smashing the trammels of the old ideas,” says the English version of the city’s history, as recounted in Shenzhen’s municipal museum in an odd, modern-Chinese combination of Maoist bombast and supercapitalist perspective. “With the market-oriented reforms as the breakthrough point, they shook off the yoke of the planned economy, and gradually built up new management systems.”

What all this refers to is the establishment, in the late summer of 1980, of Shenzhen as a “special economic zone,” where few limits or controls would apply and businesses from around the world would be invited to set up shop. Shenzhen was attractive as an experimental locale, not just because it was so close to Hong Kong, with its efficient harbor and airport, but also because it was so far from Beijing. If the experiment went wrong, the consequences could be more easily contained in this southern extremity of the country. Nearly every rule that might restrict business development was changed or removed in Shenzhen. Several free-trade processing zones were established, where materials and machinery coming in and exports going out would be exempt from the usual duties or taxes.

Modern Shenzhen has traits that Americans would associate with a booming Sun Belt city—transient, rough, unmannered, full of opportunity—and that characterized Manchester, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles at their times of fastest growth. Newspapers that cover Shenzhen are full of stories of drugs, crime, and vice in the most crowded tenement areas, where walls and sidewalks are covered with spray-painted phone numbers. Some are for prostitutes, but many are for vendors who can provide fake documents—health certificates, diplomas, residence credentials—for those seeking work.

The Sheraton Four Points is part of the process that keeps Shenzhen growing. It is one of the places foreigners go when they are ready to buy from China.

The foreigners in their 30s through 50s who come to Shanghai are often financiers, consultants, or lawyers. They tend to be lean, with good suits and haircuts. Those in Beijing are often diplomats, academics, or from foundations or NGOs. They look a little less polished. The scene in and around Shenzhen is different. It is an international group—Americans, Taiwanese, Europeans, Japanese—of a single class. Virtually all of them are designers, engineers, or buyers from foreign companies who have come to meet with Chinese factory owners. The Americans in the group tend to be beefier than the Shanghai-Beijing crowd, and more Midwestern-looking. Some wear company shirts or nylon jackets with their company’s logo on the pocket.

When the Four Points restaurant opens at 6:30 in the morning, foreigners begin assembling for breakfast, the meal when people most crave their native cuisine. It is laid out for all comers on a huge buffet: for the Europeans, sliced meats and cheese, good breads, strong coffee, muesli and yogurt. For the Japanese, pickles, sushi, cold noodles, smoked eel over rice. For the Taiwanese and other Chinese, steamed buns, dim sum, hot congee cereal. For the Americans, the makings of a Denny’s-style “Slam” breakfast: thick waffles, eggs, hash-brown potatoes, sausage and bacon and ham. My wife finally accused me of spending so much time in Shenzhen just for the breakfasts.

The room is noisy, as people discuss their plans for the day or meet the Chinese factory officials who will conduct them on their tours. The room empties dramatically by nine o’clock, as people go out to meet their drivers and vans, and the day’s factory touring and contract signing begin. As best I could tell from chatting with fellow guests, in all my trips to the Four Points, I was the only person there not on a buying mission.

Nearly every morning one man, a 41-year-old Irish bachelor, sits at the same table at the Four Points. Very late in the evening, he is at that table for dinner too. The table is near the entrance, from which the rest of the room can be surveyed. On a typical night, the company he owns will have 10 to 15 rooms booked at the hotel, for foreign visitors coming to do business with him. Often a few will join him for dinner. When the waiters see this man coming, they bring the plain Western food—meat, potatoes—they know he’s interested in. “Do you have the same thing every night?” I asked him when I saw the waiters’ reflexive response to his arrival. “I didn’t come here for the food,” he replied.

This man has lived in an apartment at the Four Points for the last two years, and in other hotels around Shenzhen for the previous eight. He makes a point of telling people that he does not speak Chinese—most business visitors who try, he says, have to work so hard to cope with the language that they forget what they’re negotiating about. But at useful points in meetings he drops in Chinese colloquialisms so that people must wonder whether in fact he has understood everything that has been said. (He tells me he hasn’t.) His name is Liam Casey, and I have come to think of him as “Mr. China.”

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MR CHINA: Liam Casey stands beside workers assembling laptop computers
“Mr. China” is an established jokey honorific, like People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive—2003.” Since the days of Marco Polo, successive foreigners have competed informally for recognition as the person who really understands the country and can make things happen here. The hilarious 2005 memoir Mr. China, by Tim Clissold, describes the heartbreak and frustration of a young British financier who thought he could figure out the secrets of success in China when it was first opening up to Western commerce.

Liam Casey has succeeded where Tim Clissold was frustrated, but he is careful not to sound overconfident. “Just when you think you know what’s happening here, that’s when you’re in danger,” he says. “You see some new product on the market, and you wonder where it was made—and it turns out to be a factory you drove by every day for five years and never knew what was going on inside! You can be here so long and know so little.” But for my purposes he is Mr. China, because he is at the center of the overlapping flows of humanity bringing the world’s work to China.

When not dining or sleeping at the Four Points, Casey runs a company he owns outright, with 800 employees (50 of them are from Ireland, America, or one of a dozen other nations; the rest are Chinese) and sales last year of about $125 million. He is of medium height and fit-seeming in a compact way, with thick dark hair and a long face that generally has an impish expression. He has a strong Irish accent and dresses informally. He walks, talks, and moves so fast that I was generally scrambling to keep up.

Casey grew up on a farm outside Cork, had no formal education after high school, and first worked as a salesman in garment shops in Cork and then Dublin. He got involved in buying garments from Europe, with a friend set up a Crate & Barrel–style store in Ireland, then decided to travel. At age 29 he arrived in Southern California and worked briefly for a trading company. He says he would be in America still—“Laguna, Newport Beach, ah, I luvved it”—but he could not get a green card or long-term work permit, and didn’t want to try to stay there under the radar.

(I might as well say this in every article I write from overseas: The easier America makes it for talented foreigners to work and study there, the richer, more powerful, and more respected America will be. America’s ability to absorb the world’s talent is the crucial advantage no other culture can match—as long as America doesn’t forfeit this advantage with visa rules written mainly out of fear.)

So in 1996, just after he turned 30, Casey went to Taipei for an electronics trade show. It was his first trip to Asia, and, he says, “I could see this is where the opportunity was.” Within a year, he had set up operations in the Shenzhen area and started the company now known as PCH China Solutions. The initials stand for Pacific Coast Highway, in honor of his happy Southern California days.

What does this company do? The short answer is outsourcing, which in effect means matching foreign companies that want to sell products with Chinese suppliers who can make those products for them. Casey describes his mission as “helping innovators leverage the manufacturing supply chain here in China.” To see how this works, consider the great human flows that now converge in southern China, which companies like Casey’s help mediate.

One is the enormous flow of people, mainly young and unschooled, from China’s farms and villages to Shenzhen and similar cities. Some arrive with a factory job already arranged by relatives or fixers; some come to the cities and then look for work. In the movie version of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, two teenaged men from the city befriend a young woman in the mountain village where they have been sent for rustication during the Cultural Revolution. One day the young woman unexpectedly leaves. She has gone to “try her luck in a big city,” her grandfather tells them. “She said she wanted a new life.” The new life is in Shenzhen.

Multiplied millions of times, and perhaps lacking the specific drama of the Balzac tale, this is the story of the factory towns. As in the novel, many of the migrants are young women. In the light-manufacturing operations I have seen in the Pearl River Delta and around Shanghai, the workforce is predominantly female. Signing on with a factory essentially means making your job your life. Workers who come to the big coastal factory centers either arrive, like the little seamstress, before they have a spouse or children, or leave their dependents at home with grandparents, aunts, or uncles. At the electronics and household-goods factories, including many I’ve seen, the pay is between 900 and 1,200 RMB per month, or about $115 to $155. In the villages the workers left, a farm family’s cash earnings might be a few thousand RMB per year. Pay is generally lowest, and discipline toughest, at factories owned and managed by Taiwanese or mainland Chinese companies. The gigantic Foxconn (run by its founder, Terry Guo of Taiwan) is known for a militaristic organization and approach. Jobs with Western firms are the cushiest but are also rare, since the big European and American companies buy mainly from local subcontractors. Casey says that monthly pay in some factories he owns is several hundred RMB more than the local average. His goal is to retain workers for longer than the standard few-year stint, allowing them to develop greater skills and a sense of company spirit.

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WORKERS at an Inventec factory in Shanghai check computer motherboards
A factory work shift is typically 12 hours, usually with two breaks for meals (subsidized or free), six or seven days per week. Whenever the action lets up—if the assembly line is down for some reason, if a worker has spare time at a meal break—many people place their heads down on the table in front of them and appear to fall asleep instantly. Chinese law says that the standard workweek is 40 hours, so this means a lot of overtime, which is included in the pay rates above. Since their home village may be several days’ travel by train and bus, workers from the hinterland usually go back only once a year. They all go at the same time—during the “Spring Festival,” or Chinese New Year, when ports and factories effectively close for a week or so and the nation’s transport system is choked. “The people here work hard,” an American manager in a U.S.-owned plant told me. “They’re young. They’re quick. There’s none of this ‘I have to go pick up the kids’ nonsense you get in the States.”

At every electronics factory I’ve seen, each person on an assembly line has a bunch of documents posted by her workstation: her photo, name, and employee number, often the instructions she is to follow in both English and Chinese. Often too there’s a visible sign of how well she’s doing. For the production line as a whole there are hourly totals of target and actual production, plus allowable and actual defect levels. At several Taiwanese-owned factories I’ve seen, the indicator of individual performance is a childish outline drawing of a tree with leaves. After each day’s shift one of the tree’s leaves is filled in with a colored marker, either red or green. If the leaf is green, the worker has met her quota and caused no problems. If it’s red, a defect has been traced back to her workstation. One red leaf per month is within tolerance; two is a problem.

As in all previous great waves of industrialization, many people end up staying in town; that’s why Shenzhen has grown so large. But more than was the case during America’s or England’s booms in factory work, many rural people, especially the young women, work for two or three years and then go back to the country with their savings. In their village they open a shop, marry a local man and start a family, buy land, or use their earnings to help the relatives still at home.

Life in the factories is obviously hard, and in the heavy- industry works it is very dangerous. In the same week that 32 people were murdered at Virginia Tech, 32 Chinese workers at a steel plant in the north were scalded to death when a ladleful of molten steel was accidentally dumped on them. Even in Chinese papers, that story got less play than the U.S. shooting—and fatal coal-mine disasters are so common that they are reported as if they were traffic deaths. By comparison, the light industries that typify southern China are tedious but less overtly hazardous. As the foreman of a Taiwanese electronics factory put it to me when I asked him about rough working conditions, “Have you ever seen a Chinese farm?” An American industrial designer who works in China told me about a U.S. academic who toured his factory and was horrified to see young female workers chained to their stations. What she saw was actually the grounding wire that is mandatory in most electronics plants. Each person on the assembly line has a Velcro band around her wrist, which is connected to the worktable to avoid a static- electricity buildup that could destroy computer chips.

That so many people are in motion gives Shenzhen and surrounding areas a rootless, transient quality. The natural language of southern China is Cantonese, but in the factory cities the lingua franca is Mandarin, the language that people from different parts of China are likeliest to share. “I don’t like it here,” a Chinese manager originally from Beijing told me, three years into a work assignment to Shenzhen. “There are no roots or culture.” “For the first few weeks I was here, I thought it was soulless,” Liam Casey says of the town that has been his home for 10 years. “But like any fast-moving place, the activity is the character. It’s like New York. You arrive at the airport and go downtown, and when you get out of that cab, no one knows where you came from. You could have been there one hour, you could have been there 10 years—no one can tell. It’s similar here, which makes it exciting.” Casey told me that, to him, Shanghai felt slow “and made for tourists.” Indeed, I am regularly surprised to find that people stroll rather than stride along the sidewalks of Shanghai: It’s a busy city with slow pedestrians. Or maybe Casey’s outlook is contagious.

Another great flow into Shenzhen and similar cities is of entrepreneurs who have come and set up factories. The point of the Shenzhen liberalizations was less to foster any one industry than to make it easy for businesses in general to get a start.

Many entrepreneurs attracted by the offer came from Taiwan, whose economy is characterized by small, mainly family-owned firms like those that now abound in southern China. Overall, mainland China’s development model is closer to Taiwan’s than to Japan’s or Korea’s. In all these countries and throughout East Asia, governments use many tools to maximize industrial output: tax policy, trading rules, currency values, and so on. But Japanese and Korean policy has tended to emphasize the welfare of large, national-champion firms—Mitsubishi and Toyota, Lucky Gold Star and Samsung—whereas Taiwan’s exporters have been thousands of small firms, a few of which grew large. China is, of course, vaster than the other countries combined, but its export-oriented companies are small. One reason for the atomization is pervasive mistrust and corruption, plus a shaky rule of law. Even Foxconn, China’s largest exporter, was only No. 206 on last year’s Fortune Global 500 list of the biggest companies in the world. When foreigners have trouble entering the Japanese or Korean markets, it is often because they run up against barriers protecting big, well-known local interests. The problem in China is typically the opposite: Foreigners don’t know where to start or whom to deal with in the chaos of small, indistinguishable firms.

For me, the fragmented nature of the Chinese system is symbolized by yet another of the stunning sights in Shenzhen: the SEG Electronics Market, a seven-story downtown structure whose every inch is crammed with the sales booths of hundreds of mom-and-pop electronics dealers. “Chips that I couldn’t dream of buying in the U.S., reels of rare ceramic capacitors that I only dream about at night!” Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, a Chinese-American electronics Ph.D. from MIT, wrote in his blog after a visit. “My senses tingle, my head spins. I can’t suppress a smirk of anticipation as I walk around the next corner, to see shops stacked floor to ceiling with probably a hundred million resistors and capacitors.” As he noted, “within an hour’s drive north” were hundreds of factories that could “take any electronics ideas and pump them out by the literal boatload.” The market is part permanent trade show, part supply stop for people who suddenly need some capacitors or connectors for a prototype or last-minute project, part swap meet where traders unload surplus components.

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FACTORY WORKERS on their way to work in Shenzhen
One last flow coming into Shenzhen, which makes the other flows possible, is represented by the people at the Four Points: buyers from high-wage countries who have decided that they want to take advantage of, rather than compete with, low-cost Chinese manufacturers. This is where our Mr. China, and others like him, fit in.

This is also where a veil falls. In decades of reporting on military matters, I have rarely encountered people as concerned about keeping secrets as the buyers and suppliers who meet in Shenzhen and similar cities. What information are they committed to protect? Names, places, and product numbers that would reveal which Western companies obtain which exact products from which Chinese suppliers. There are high- and low-road reasons for their concern.

The low-road reason is the “Nike problem.” This is the buyers’ wish to minimize their brands’ association with outsourcing in general and Asian sweatshops in particular, named for Nike’s PR problems because of its factories in Indonesia. By Chinese standards, the most successful exporting factories are tough rather than abusive, but those are not the standards Western customers might apply.

The high-road reason involves the crucial operational importance of the “supply chain.” It is not easy to find the right factory, work out the right manufacturing system, ensure the right supply of parts and raw material, impose the right quality standards, and develop the right relationship of trust and reliability. Companies that have solved these problems don’t want to tell their competitors how they did so. “Supply chain is intellectual property,” is the way Liam Casey put it. Asking a Western company to specify its Chinese suppliers is like asking a reporter to hand over a list of his best sources.

Because keeping the supply chain confidential is so important to buyers, they try to impose confidentiality on their suppliers. When an outside company’s reputation for design and quality is strong—Sony, Braun, Apple—many Chinese contractors like to drop hints that they are part of its supply chain. But the ones who really are part of it must be more discreet if they want to retain the buying company’s trust (and business).

So I will withhold details, but ask you to take this leap: If you think of major U.S. or European brand names in the following businesses, odds are their products come from factories like those I’m about to describe. The businesses are: computers, including desktops, laptops, and servers; telecom equipment, from routers to mobile phones; audio equipment, including anything MP3-related, home stereo systems, most portable devices, and headsets; video equipment of all sorts, from cameras and camcorders to replay devices; personal-care items and high-end specialty-catalog goods; medical devices; sporting goods and exercise equipment; any kind of electronic goods or accessories; and, for that matter, just about anything else you can think of. Some of the examples I’ll give come from sites in Shenzhen, but others are from facilities near Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Xiamen, and elsewhere.

Why does a foreign company come to our Mr. China? I asked Casey what he would tell me if I were in, say, some branch of the steel industry in Pittsburgh and was looking to cut costs. “Not interested,” he said. “The product’s too heavy, and you’ve probably already automated the process, so one person is pushing a button. It would cost you almost as much to have someone push the button in China.”

But what is of intense interest to him, he said, is a company that has built up a brand name and relationships with retailers, and knows what it wants to promote and sell next—and needs to save time and money in manufacturing a product that requires a fair amount of assembly. “That is where we can help, because you will come here and see factories that are better than the ones you’ve been working with in America or Germany.”

Here are a few examples, all based on real-world cases: You have announced a major new product, which has gotten great buzz in the press. But close to release time, you discover a design problem that must be fixed—and no U.S. factory can adjust its production process in time.

The Chinese factories can respond more quickly, and not simply because of 12-hour workdays. “Anyplace else, you’d have to import different raw materials and components,” Casey told me. “Here, you’ve got nine different suppliers within a mile, and they can bring a sample over that afternoon. People think China is cheap, but really, it’s fast.” Moreover, the Chinese factories use more human labor, and fewer expensive robots or assembly machines, than their counterparts in rich countries. “People are the most adaptable machines,” an American industrial designer who works in China told me. “Machines need to be reprogrammed. You can have people doing something entirely different next week.”

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CHIP RESISTORS displayed in martini glasses at a booth inside the SEG Electronics Market in Shenzhen
Or: You are an American inventor with a product you think has “green” potential for household energy savings. But you need to get it to market fast, because you think big companies may be trying the same thing, and you need to meet a target retail price of $100. “No place but China to do this,” Mr. China said, as he showed me the finished product.

Or: You are a very famous American company, and you worry that you’ve tied up too much capital keeping inventory for retail stores at several supply depots in America. With Mr. China’s help, you start emphasizing direct retail sales on your Web site—and do all the shipping and fulfillment from one supply depot, run by young Chinese women in Shenzhen, who can ship directly to specific retail stores.

Over the course of repeated visits to Shenzhen—the breakfasts!—and visits to other manufacturing regions, I heard about many similar cases and saw some of the tools that have made it possible for Western countries to view China as their manufacturing heartland.

Some involve computerized knowledge. Casey’s PCH has a Google Earth–like system that incorporates what he has learned in 10 years of dealing with Chinese subcontractors. You name a product you want to make—say, a new case or headset for a mobile phone. Casey clicks on the map and shows the companies that can produce the necessary components—and exactly how far they are from each other in travel time. This is hard-won knowledge in an area where city maps are out of date as soon as they are published and addresses are approximate. (Casey’s are keyed in with GPS coordinates, discreetly read from his GPS-equipped mobile phone when he visits each factory.) If a factory looks promising, you click again and get interior and exterior photos, a rundown on the management, in some cases videos of the assembly line in action, plus spec sheets and engineering drawings for orders they have already filled. Similar programs allow Casey and his clients to see which ship, plane, or truck their products are on anywhere in the world, and the amount of stock on hand in any warehouse or depot. (How do they know? Each finished piece and almost every component has an individual bar code that is scanned practically every time it is touched.)

The factories whose workflow Casey monitors vary tremendously, though not in their looks. I’ve come to think that there is only one set of blueprints for factories in China: a big, boxy, warehouse-looking structure, usually made of concrete and usually five stories; white or gray outside; relatively large windows, which is how you can tell it from the workers’ dormitories; high ceilings, to accommodate machines. But inside, some are highly automated while some are amazingly reliant on hand labor. I’m not even speaking of the bad, dangerous, and out-of-date factories frequently found in the north of China, where leftover Maoist-era heavy-industry hulks abound. Even some newly built facilities leave to human hands work that has been done in the West for many decades by machines. Imagine opening a consumer product—a mobile phone, an electric toothbrush, a wireless router—and finding a part that was snapped on or glued into place. It was probably put there by a young Chinese woman who did the same thing many times per minute throughout her 12-hour workday.

I could describe many installations, but I was fascinated by two. The first represents one extreme in automation. It is owned and operated by Inventec, one of five companies based in Taiwan that together produce the vast majority of laptop and notebook computers sold under any brand anywhere in the world. Everyone in America has heard of Dell, Sony, Compaq, HP, Lenovo-IBM ThinkPad, Apple, NEC, Gateway, Toshiba. Almost no one has heard of Quanta, Compal, Inventec, Wistron, Asustek. Yet nearly 90 percent of laptops and notebooks sold under the famous brand names are actually made by one of these five companies in their factories in mainland China. I have seen a factory with three “competing” brand names coming off the same line.

The Inventec installation I saw was in an export-processing zone in Shanghai specially created for the company, in which imported components for manufacturing and finished products for export were free of the usual duties or taxes. It turns out more than 30,000 notebook computers per day, under one of the brand names listed above. Each day, an Inventec plant on the same campus produces hundreds of large, famous-brand-name server computers to run Internet traffic.

This is today’s rough counterpart to the Ford Motor Company’s old River Rouge works. In the heyday of The Rouge, rubber, steel, and other raw materials would come into the plant, and finished autos would come out. Here, naked green circuit boards, capacitors, chip sets, and other components come in each day, and notebook computers come out. Some advanced components arrive already assembled: disk drives from Taiwan or Singapore, LCD screens from Korea or Japan, keyboards and power supplies from other plants in China.

The overall process looks the way you would expect a high-tech assembly line to. Conveyers and robots take the evolving computer from station to station; each unit arrives in front of a worker a split second after she has finished with the previous one. Before a component goes into a machine, its bar code is scanned to be sure it is the right part; after it is added, the machine is “check-weighed” to see that its new weight is correct. Hundreds of tiny transistors, chips, and other electronic parts are attached to each circuit board by “pick and place” robots, whose multiple arms move almost too fast to follow. The welds on the board are scanned with lasers for defects. Any with problems are set aside for women specialists, looking through huge magnifying glasses, to reweld. Why did this factory invest so much in robots and machine tools? I asked a supervisor from Taiwan. “People can’t do it precisely enough,” was his answer. These factories automate not what’s too expensive but what’s too delicate for human beings to perform.

Many of the notebook computers have been ordered online, and as they near completion each is “flavored” for its destination. The day I visited, one was going to Tokyo, with a Japanese keyboard installed and Japanese logos snapped into the right places on the case; the next one was headed for the United States. After display screens are installed, each computer rides on a kind of racetrack along the ceiling of the factory, where it runs for several hours to make sure that all components work. Then the conveyers carry it to the final flavoring step—the “burn in” of the operating system, which on my visit was Windows Vista, in many languages. One engineer pointed out that because Vista requires up to 10 times as much disk space as Windows XP, the assembly line had to be altered to allow a much longer, slower passage through the burn-in station.

The other facility that intrigued me, one of Liam Casey’s in Shenzhen, handled online orders for a different well-known American company. I was there around dawn, which was crunch time. Because of the 12-hour time difference from the U.S. East Coast, orders Americans place in the late afternoon arrive in China in the dead of night. As I watched, a customer in Palatine, Illinois, perhaps shopping from his office, clicked on the American company’s Web site to order two $25 accessories. A few seconds later, the order appeared on the screen 7,800 miles away in Shenzhen. It automatically generated a packing and address slip and several bar-code labels. One young woman put the address label on a brown cardboard shipping box and the packing slip inside. The box moved down a conveyer belt to another woman working a “pick to light” system: She stood in front of a kind of cupboard with a separate open-fronted bin for each item customers might order from the Web site; a light turned on over each bin holding a part specified in the latest order. She picked the item out of that bin, ran it past a scanner that checked its number (and signaled the light to go off), and put it in the box. More check- weighing and rescanning followed, and when the box was sealed, young men added it to a shipping pallet.

By the time the night shift was ready to leave—8 a.m. China time, 7 p.m. in Palatine, 8 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast—the volume of orders from America was tapering off. More important, the FedEx pickup time was drawing near. At 9 a.m. couriers would arrive and rush the pallets to the Hong Kong airport. The FedEx flight to Anchorage would leave by 6 p.m., and when it got there, the goods on this company’s pallets would be combined with other Chinese exports and re-sorted for destinations in America. Forty-eight hours after the man in Palatine clicked “Buy it now!” on his computer, the item showed up at his door. Its return address was a company warehouse in the United States; a small MADE IN CHINA label was on the bottom of the box.

At 8 a.m. in Shenzhen, the young women on the night shift got up from the assembly line, took off the hats and hairnets they had been wearing, and shook out their dark hair. They passed through the metal detector at the door to their workroom (they pass through it going in and coming out) and walked downstairs to the racks where they had left their bikes. They wore red company jackets, as part of their working uniform—and, as an informal uniform, virtually every one wore tight, low-rise blue jeans with embroidery or sequins on the seams. Most of them rode their bikes back to the dormitory; others walked, or walked their bikes, chatting with each other. That evening they would be back at work. Meanwhile, flocks of red-topped, blue-bottomed young women on the day shift filled the road, riding their bikes in.

Good for Us—For Now
What should we make of this? The evidence suggests what I hadn’t expected: that the interaction has been good for most participants—so far.

Has the factory boom been good for China? Of course it has. Yes, it creates environmental pressures that, if not controlled, could pollute China and the world out of existence. The national government’s current Five Year Plan—the 11th, running through 2010—has as its central theme China’s development as a “harmonious society,” or hexie shehui, a phrase heard about as often from China’s leadership as “global war on terror” has been heard from America’s. In China, the phrase is code for attempting to deal with income inequalities, especially the hardships of farmers and millions of migrant laborers. But it is also code for at least talking about protecting the environment.

And, yes, throughout China’s boom many people have been mistreated, oppressed, sometimes worked to death in factories. Even those not abused may be lonely and lost, with damaging effects on the country’s social fabric. But this was also the story of Britain and America when they built their great industries, their great turbulent industrial cities, and ultimately their great industrial middle classes. For China, it is far from the worst social disruption the country has endured in the last 50 years. At least this upheaval, unlike the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and Cultural Revolution of the ’60s and early ’70s, has some benefits for individuals and the nation.

Some Westerners may feel that even today’s “normal” Chinese working conditions amount to slave labor—$100 a month, no life outside the factory, work shifts so long there’s barely time to do more than try to sleep in a jam-packed dormitory. Here is an uncomfortable truth I’m waiting for some Chinese official to point out: The woman from the hinterland working in Shenzhen is arguably better off economically than an American in Chicago living on minimum wage. She can save most of what she makes and feel she is on the way up; the American can’t and doesn’t. Over the next two years, the minimum wage in the United States is expected to rise to $7.25 an hour. Assuming a 40-hour week, that’s just under $1,200 per month, or about 10 times the Chinese factory wage. But that’s before payroll deductions and the cost of food and housing, which are free or subsidized in China’s factory towns.

Chinese spokesmen do make a different point about their economy, and they rattle it off so frequently that Western audiences are tempted to dismiss it. They say, “Whatever else we have done, we have brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.” That is true, it is important, and the manufacturing export boom has been a significant part of how China has done it. This economic success obviously does not justify everything the regime has done, especially its crushing of any challenge to one-party rule. But the magnitude of the achievement can’t be ignored. For all of the billions of dollars given in foreign aid and supervised by the World Bank, the greatest good for the greatest number of the world’s previously impoverished people in at least the last half century has been achieved in China, thanks largely to the outsourcing boom.

Has the move to China been good for American companies? The answer would seemingly have to be yes—otherwise, why would they go there? It is conceivable that bad partnerships, stolen intellectual property, dilution of brand name, logistics nightmares, or other difficulties have given many companies a sour view of outsourcing; I have heard examples in each category from foreign executives. But the more interesting theme I have heard from them, which explains why they are willing to surmount the inconveniences, involves something called the “smiley curve.”

The curve is named for the U-shaped arc of the 1970s-era smiley-face icon, and it runs from the beginning to the end of a product’s creation and sale. At the beginning is the company’s brand: HP, Siemens, Dell, Nokia, Apple. Next comes the idea for the product: an iPod, a new computer, a camera phone. After that is high-level industrial design—the conceiving of how the product will look and work. Then the detailed engineering design for how it will be made. Then the necessary components. Then the actual manufacture and assembly. Then the shipping and distribution. Then retail sales. And, finally, service contracts and sales of parts and accessories.

The significance is that China’s activity is in the middle stages—manufacturing, plus some component supply and engineering design—but America’s is at the two ends, and those are where the money is. The smiley curve, which shows the profitability or value added at each stage, starts high for branding and product concept, swoops down for manufacturing, and rises again in the retail and servicing stages. The simple way to put this—that the real money is in brand name, plus retail—may sound obvious, but its implications are illuminating.

At each factory I visited, I asked managers to estimate how much of a product’s sales price ended up in whose hands. The strength of the brand name was the most important variable. If a product is unusual enough and its brand name attractive enough, it could command so high a price that the retailer might keep half the revenue. (Think: an Armani suit, a Starbucks latte.) Most electronics products are now subject to much fiercer price competition, since it is so easy for shoppers to find bargains on the Internet. Therefore the generic Windows-style laptops I saw in one modern factory might go for around $1,000 in the United States, with the retailer keeping less than $50.

Where does the rest of the money go? The manager of that factory guessed that Intel and Microsoft together would collect about $300, and that the makers of the display screen, the disk-storage devices, and other electronic components might get $150 or so apiece. The keyboard makers would get $15 or $20; FedEx or UPS would get slightly less. When all other costs were accounted for, perhaps $30 to $40—3 to 4 percent of the total—would stay in China with the factory owners and the young women on the assembly lines.

Other examples: A carrying case for an audio device from a big-name Western company retails for just under $30. That company pays the Chinese supplier $6 per case, of which about half goes for materials. The other $24 stays with the big-name company. An earphone-like accessory for another U.S.-brand audio device also retails for about $30. Of this, I was told, $3 stayed in China. I saw a set of high-end Ethernet connecting cables. The cables are sold, with identical specifications but in three different kinds of packaging, in three forms in the United States: as a specialty product, as a house brand in a nationwide office-supply store, and with no brand over eBay. The retail prices are $29.95 for the specialty brand, $19.95 in the chain store, and $15.95 on eBay. The Shenzhen-area company that makes them gets $2 apiece.

In case the point isn’t clear: Chinese workers making $1,000 a year have been helping American designers, marketers, engineers, and retailers making $1,000 a week (and up) earn even more. Plus, they have helped shareholders of U.S.-based companies.

All this is apart from a phenomenon that will be the subject of a future article: China’s conversion of its trade surpluses into a vast hoard of dollar-denominated reserves. Everyone understands that in the short run China’s handling of its reserves has been a convenience to the United States. By placing more than $1 trillion in U.S. stock and bond markets, it has propped up the U.S. economy. Asset prices are higher than they would otherwise be; interest rates are lower, whether for American families taking out mortgages or for American taxpayers financing the ever-mounting federal debt. The dollar has also fallen less than it otherwise would have—which in the short run helps American consumers keep buying Chinese goods.

Everyone also understands that in the long run China must change this policy. Its own people need too many things—schools, hospitals, railroads—for it to keep sending its profits to America. It won’t forever sink its savings into a currency, the dollar, virtually guaranteed to keep falling against the RMB. This year the central government created a commission to consider the right long-term use for China’s reserves. No one expects the recommendation to be: Keep buying dollars. How and when the change will occur, what it will be, and what consequences it will have, is what everyone would like to know.

One other aspect of China’s development to date has helped American companies in their dealings with it. This is the fact that China, so far, has been different in crucial ways from America’s previous great Asian challenger: Japan. Americans have come to view the Japanese economy as a kind of joke, mainly because the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been in a slump for nearly 20 years. Nonetheless, Japan remains the world’s second-largest economy. Toyota has overtaken General Motors to become the largest automaker; Japan’s exporters have continually increased their sales of electronics and other high-value goods; and the long-standing logic of the Japanese system, in which consumers and investors suffer so that producers may thrive, remains intact.

Japan was already a rich and modern country, as China still is not, by the time trade friction intensified, in the 1980s. More important, its leading companies were often competing head-to-head with established high-value, high-tech companies in the United States: Fujitsu against IBM, Toshiba against Intel, Fuji against Kodak, Sony and Matsushita against Motorola, and on down the list. Gains for Japanese companies often meant direct losses for companies in America—whether those companies were seen as stodgy and noninnovative, like the Detroit firms, or technologically agile and advanced, like the semiconductor makers.

For the moment, China’s situation is different. Its companies are numerous but small. Lenovo and Qingdao are its two globally recognized brand names. But Lenovo is known mainly because it bought the ThinkPad brand from IBM, and a quarter of Qingdao Beer is owned by Anheuser-Busch. Chinese exporters have done best when working for, rather than against, Western companies, as Foxconn (like numerous smaller firms) has in working with Apple. While the Chinese government obviously wants to strengthen the country’s brands—for instance, with an aircraft company it hopes will compete with Boeing and Airbus—its “industrial planning” has mainly taken the form not of specific targeting but of general business promotion, as with the incentives that brought companies to Shenzhen.

China’s economy, technically still socialist, has also been strangely more open than Japan’s. Through its first four decades of growth after World War II, Japan was essentially closed to foreign ownership and investment. (Texas Instruments and IBM were two highly publicized exceptions to the rule.) China’s industrial boom, by contrast, is occurring during the age of the World Trade Organization, to which it was admitted in 2001. Under WTO rules, China is obliged to open itself to foreign investment and ownership at a much earlier stage of its development than Japan did. Its export boom has been led by foreign firms. China is rife with intellectual piracy, hidden trade barriers, and other impediments. But overall it is harder for foreign economies or foreign companies to claim damage from China’s trade policies than from Japan’s.

When I was living in Japan through its boom of the late ’80s, I argued in this magazine that its behavior illustrated some great historic truths that economic models cannot easily include. Sometimes societies pursue goals other than the one economists consider rational: the greatest possible growth of consumer well-being. This has been true of America mainly during wartime, but also when it has pursued martial-toned projects thought to be in the nation’s interest: building interstate highways, sending men into space, perhaps someday developing alternative energy supplies. In a more consistent way, over decades, this has been true of Japan.

For anyone who has taken Ec 101, the natural response would be: That’s their problem! They’re making high-quality products for everyone else, so what’s not to like? But in the past decade, a growing number of respectable economists have argued that the situation is not that simple. If one nation deliberately promotes high-tech and high-value industries, it can end up with more of those industries, and more of the high-wage jobs that go with them, than it would have otherwise. This is not economically “rational”—European countries have paid heavily for each job they have created through Airbus. But Boeing sells fewer airplanes and employs fewer engineers than it presumably would without competition from Airbus. The United States does not have to emulate Europe’s approach, or Japan’s. But it needs to be aware of them, and of the possible consequences. (With different emphases, Paul Samuelson of MIT, Alan Blinder and William Baumol of Princeton, and Ralph Gomory, head of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, have advanced this argument.)

China’s behavior, and that of its companies, is easier to match with standard economic theories than Japan’s. So far, deals like those struck at the Sheraton Four Points have been mainly good for all parties. Chinese families have new opportunities in life. American customers have wider choices. American investors have better returns. But, of course, there are complications.

First is the social effect visible around the world, which in homage to China’s Communist past we can call “intensifying the contradictions.” Global trade involves one great contradiction: The lower the barriers to the flow of money, products, and ideas, the less it matters where people live. But because most people cannot move from one country to another, it will always matter where people live. In a world of frictionless, completely globalized trade, people on average would all be richer—but every society would include a wider range of class, comfort, and well-being than it now does. Those with the most marketable global talents would be richer, because they could sell to the largest possible market. Everyone else would be poorer, because of competition from a billions-strong labor pool. With no trade barriers, there would be no reason why the average person in, say, Holland would be better off than the average one in India. Each society would contain a cross section of the world’s whole income distribution—yet its people would have to live within the same national borders.

We’re nowhere near that point. But the increasing integration of the American and Chinese economies pushes both countries toward it. This is more or less all good for China, but not all good for America. It means economic benefits mainly for those who have already succeeded, a harder path up for those who are already at a disadvantage, and further strain on the already weakened sense of fellow feeling and shared opportunity that allows a society as diverse and unequal as America’s to cohere.

A further problem is that China’s business and governmental leaders are all too aware of how the smiley curve affects them. Yes, it’s better to have jobs that pay $1,000 a year than none at all. But it would be better still to have jobs that pay many times as much and are at more desirable positions along the curve. If the United States were in China’s position, it would be doing everything possible to bring more high-value work within its borders—and that, of course, is what China is trying to do. Everywhere you turn you see an illustration.

Just a few: In the far north of China, Intel has just agreed to build a major chip-fabrication plant, with high-end engineering and design jobs, not just seats on the assembly line. In Beijing, both Microsoft and Google have opened genuine research centers, not just offices to serve the local market. Down in Shenzhen, Liam Casey’s company is creating industrial-design centers, where products will be conceived, not just snapped together. What was recently a factory zone in Shanghai is being gentrified; local authorities are pushing factories to relocate 10 miles away, so their buildings can be turned into white-collar engineering and design centers.

At the moment, most jobs I’ve seen the young women in the factories perform have not been “taken” from America, because in America these assembly-type tasks would be done by machines. But the Chinese goal is, of course, to build toward something more lucrative.

Many people I have spoken with say that the climb will be slow for Chinese industries, because they have so far to go in bringing their design, management, and branding efforts up to world standards. “Think about it—global companies are full of CEOs and executives from India, but very few Chinese,” Dominic Barton, the chairman of Mc­Kinsey’s Asia Pacific practice, told me. The main reason, he said, is China’s limited pool of executives with adequate foreign-language skills and experience working abroad. Andy Switky, the managing director–Asia Pacific for the famed California design firm IDEO, described a frequent Chinese outlook toward quality control as “happy with crappy.” This makes it hard for them to move beyond the local, low-value market. “Even now in China, most people don’t have an iPod or a notebook computer,” the manager of a Taiwanese-owned audio-device factory told me. “So it’s harder for them to think up improvements, or even tell a good one from a bad one.” These and other factors may slow China’s progress. But that’s a feeble basis for American hopes.

The measures Americans most often discuss for dealing with China are not much better as a long-term basis for hope. Yes, the RMB is now undervalued against the dollar. Yes, that makes Chinese exports cheaper than they would otherwise be. And yes, the RMB’s value should rise—and it will. But at no conceivable level would it bring those Shenzhen jobs back to Ohio. At best it would make U.S. exports, from locomotives and high-tech medical equipment to wine and software, more attractive. Such commercial victories are important, but they are unlikely to be advanced by threats of retaliatory tariffs if China does not speed the RMB’s climb. Also, the faster the dollar falls against the RMB, the faster Chinese authorities might move their assets out of dollars to stronger currencies.

This year the U.S. government imposed special tariffs, called countervailing duties, on imports of glossy paper from China. This is the kind of paper used to print magazines and catalogs, and Chinese exports of it to the United States rose tenfold from 2004 to 2006. The U.S. government said the duties were necessary to offset the export subsidies Chinese manufacturers receive via low-cost loans, tax breaks, and other benefits. Under WTO rules, export subsidies of all sorts are prohibited; U.S. officials, academics, and trade groups have prepared lists of de facto subsidies that cut the price of Chinese goods to U.S. consumers by 25 percent, 40 percent, and even more. (The Chinese—like the Europeans, Australians, and others—are quick to retort that the United States subsidizes many products too, especially exports from large-scale farms.)

This is obviously significant. But think again of those Ethernet connectors that retail for $29.95 and cost only $2 to make. Removing all imaginable subsidies might push the manufacturing cost to $3. Suppose it went to $4. That would have a big effect on decisions made by corporations that outsource to China—Can they raise the retail price? Must they just accept a lower margin? Should they build the next factory in Vietnam?—but it would not make anyone bring production back to the United States.

Government policy and favoritism may play a big role in China’s huge road-building and land-development policies, but they seem to be secondary factors in the outsourcing boom. For instance, when I asked Mr. China which officials I should try to interview in the local Shenzhen government to understand how they worked with companies, he said he didn’t know. He’d never met any.

American complaints about the RMB, about subsidies, and about other Chinese practices have this in common: They assume that the solution to long-term tensions in the trading relationship lies in changes on China’s side. I think that assumption is naive. If the United States is unhappy with the effects of its interaction with China, that’s America’s problem, not China’s. To i­magine that the United States can stop China from pursuing its own economic ambitions through nagging, threats, or enticement is to fool ourselves. If a country does not like the terms of its business dealings with the world, it needs to change its own policies, not expect the world to change. China has done just that, to its own benefit—and, up until now, to America’s.

Are we uncomfortable with the America that is being shaped by global economic forces? The inequality? The sense of entitlement for some? Of stifled opportunity for others? The widespread fear that today’s trends—borrowing, consuming, looking inward, using up infrastructure—will make it hard to stay ahead tomorrow, particularly in regard to China? If so, those trends themselves, and the American choices behind them, are what Americans can address. They’re not China’s problem, and they’re not the fault of anyone in Shenzhen.

James Fallows is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and author of the newsletter Breaking the News. He was chief White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, and is a co-founder, with his wife, Deborah Fallows, of the Our Towns Civic Foundation.



全球
中国制造，世界接受
对这个世界制造业中心的观察表明，美国应该欢迎中国的崛起--目前是这样。

作者：James Fallows
2007年7月/8月号
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图片
深圳港的集装箱准备装船
来自大西洋无界。



幻灯片。"中国制造"
詹姆斯-法洛斯讲述了来自中国制造业中心的照片。
我在中国度过的一半时间是在工厂度过的。至少感觉是这样的--这是我追求的感觉。一亿多中国男人和女人在工厂里劳作，相机、衣服和其他各种器物从这里流向世界，对我来说，这是当今中国最令人吃惊和紧张的一面。就目前而言，它们也是最重要的。它们的规模首先令人震惊。我对上海的天际线和通往机场的240英里/小时的磁悬浮列车，以及北京不间断的建筑、灰尘和喧嚣有所准备。每个关于现代中国的描述都提到了这些。但我对已经成为世界制造业中心的地方没有概念：广东省的珠江三角洲（旧广州地区），就在香港的北面。这一个省的制造业劳动力可能比美国的还要多。中国的统计数据主要是猜测，但广东的人口约为9000万。如果其中有五分之一的人从事制造业工作，就像大城市中可能出现的那样，那将是1800万，而整个美国有1400万。


广东省的一个工厂，即著名的富士康工厂，位于深圳郊外的一个城市群中间，所占面积与一个主要机场的面积大致相当。约有24万人（这是我最常听到的数字；估计在20万到30万之间）在其装配线上工作，睡在宿舍里，在公司食堂吃饭。我被告知，富士康的餐饮店每天要杀3000头猪来喂养员工。这个数字是有道理的--在一个猪相对较小、猪肉是主食的国家，每80人就有一头猪（我没有听说鸡的估计数字）。从为该地区服务的主要港口--香港和深圳港，去年离开的货船装载了相当于4 000多万个标准的20英尺长的金属集装箱，这些集装箱最终被放在卡车或铁路车厢上。这相当于每秒钟一个，全年无休，而且还不到中国出口总量的一半。从美国回来的集装箱里装的是什么？我的猜测是，"美元"；事实上，从美国到中国的两个主要船运出口，按数量计算，是废纸和废金属，用于回收。

而工厂是很重要的，对中国和其他所有人。有一天，中国在国际上的重要性可能主要在于其政治制度的性质或其战略野心。当然，这些即使现在也很重要，但中国在制造业方面的成功决定了它在世界上的地位。在过去的一代中，中国的大部分优点都直接或间接地来自于它的工厂。这个国家有公共资金来建设道路、房屋和学校，特别是道路。广大农村人口拥有他们的祖先极度缺乏的东西，今天其他地方的农民仍然如此：有机会获得有偿工作，这意味着有机会摆脱农村贫困。美国人抱怨中国工厂生产的廉价垃圾，但他们依靠中国生产了很多不是垃圾的东西，而这些东西的廉价价格对美国的工业和家庭生活非常重要。现代消费文化建立在这样的假设上：最漂亮、最先进的商品--计算机、音响系统、壁挂式电视--将逐年变得更便宜。摩尔定律的一个版本是，计算能力的价格将每18个月左右减半，这是部分原因，但中国的工厂也是一个重要原因。

今天中国的许多威胁性因素也来自于其工厂。中国境内的许多人，以及境外的几乎所有人，都可以避免这个国家的政治控制所带来的直接影响。但要避免其污染则难得多。中国城市的空气比我想象的还要糟糕，而且由于污染影响到如此广泛的地方的许多人，它比伦敦、曼彻斯特或匹兹堡在其最糟糕的快速工业化时期的污染更具破坏性。空气污染直接来自钢铁厂、水泥厂和其他帮助国家繁荣的重工业设施，以及间接来自维持一切运转的发电厂。(加上越来越多的汽车，尽管中国的人均汽车数量仍然只有美国的三十分之一）。中国各地的工厂和发电厂增加其烟尘和气体输出的速度和数量，使该国的空气污染问题成为世界之最。对石油、矿石和其他商品的竞争加剧，以满足工厂的需求，这影响到其他国家，就像对食品纯度和安全的草率标准一样，这可能导致全球动物食品供应受到污染。当然，发达国家的最终恐惧是，随着中国创造了数以百万计的新工厂工作岗位，在美国、加拿大、德国甚至日本，数以百万计的人将失去这种工作。

但是，这些工厂在一个不太明显，但也是根本性的方面，既令人惊讶又很重要。它们的工作方式几乎与美国讨论它们的方式毫无关联。美国关于 "中国机会 "的政治辩论，甚至 "中国威胁 "的政治辩论，从发生外包和出口的工厂的角度来看，似乎是遥远的、理论上的和不精确的。来自美国、欧洲或日本的工业家们决定将多少生产转移到中国，他们谈论这一过程的术语与美国政治讨论中使用的术语非常不同。一个例证。中国货币相对于美元的人为低价，是美国人对中国贸易政策抱怨的首要问题。(该货币是人民币--字面意思是 "人民的钱"--或人民币）。当商业官员讨论他们在一个国家开设和在另一个国家关闭的工厂时，这更像是第八或第十个问题。而当它出现时，背景通常是人民币的上涨是否会迫使一家公司将其下一个工厂不是放在中国拥挤的沿海地区，而是放在成本更低的地方，如偏远的内陆省份，那里的工资更低，商业空间更便宜，或者也许是越南或柬埔寨。

关于中国政府对出口行业的补贴、普遍的知识产权滥用，甚至是庞大工厂内的 "奴隶劳工 "的抱怨也是如此。这些抱怨有些是有根据的，有些则不是；但即使所有这些都是真的，它们也会错误地描述和低估这里正在发生的事情。谈到中国的工业增长，美国人处于19世纪欧洲人的位置，他们认为美国的工业崛起可以简单地解释为其丰富的自然资源以及对移民和奴隶劳工的剥削，加上其对保护外国（主要是英国）书籍和发明的版权和专利法的非常随意的态度。(今天，美国人走在中国的大街上，看到他们的电影、音乐、软件和书籍以廉价的盗版形式到处出售）。一个半世纪前，查尔斯-狄更斯走在年轻的美国街头，看到他的小说以廉价的盗版形式出售，感到非常愤怒）。所有这些因素都发挥了作用，但它们不是美国崛起的全部故事，现代中国行为的相应方面也不能完全解释中国所取得的成就。

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我不能假装知道中国工业崛起的完整故事。但我可以描述我所看到的，以及它改变我想法的主要方式。

经济实力的大规模转变所产生的影响超出了纯粹的经济范畴。美国人不必敌视中国的崛起，但他们应该对其最终影响保持警惕。美国是唯一一个有规模和实力的国家，可以尝试设定与中国互动的条件，而不是一味地屈服。因此，从现在开始，美国人需要考虑他们关心的经济、环境、政治和社会目标，因为中国的影响力在增长。

这种考虑可能最好从我已经改变主意的那一点开始。到目前为止，美国与中国的经济关系是成功和有益的，而且对双方都有益。自由贸易可能并不总是对所有参与者有利，从长远来看，与中国的贸易可能对美国有危险。但根据我在中国的所见所闻，与我来之前的预期相反，到目前为止，它正像广告所说的那样运作。在考虑应该改变什么之前，美国人应该欣赏什么是正确的。深圳是开始这个故事的一个好地方。

照片：Michael Christopher Brown
它是如何运作的。从福朋酒店看风景
每次我去深圳福朋喜来登酒店吃早餐时，我都觉得自己仿佛置身于一部电影中。我脑海中有一个特定的场景：在典型的二战电影中，美国航空母舰上，飞行人员聚集在衣帽间，讨论他们即将开始的任务的时刻。

福朋酒店早上的人群也有这种期待的嗡嗡声。深圳是中国紧靠香港及其 "新界 "以北的地区，在罗纳德-里根入主白宫时，它还没有作为一个城市存在。它是一个有7万到8万人的渔镇，以中国的标准来看，几乎不引人注意。今天的其他大型沿海制造业中心，如厦门、广州、杭州和上海，几个世纪以来都是中国重要的城市。深圳则不然。在过去的25年里，深圳的人口至少增长了100倍，而不是像其他城市那样仅仅增长了三倍或四倍。它的人口与纽约大致相当，就像我不断遇到的许多中国城市一样。深圳有几十座摩天大楼和许许多多的工厂。

深圳的繁荣故事在某种意义上是现代中国工业化的第一篇章。"在建国时期，深圳人大胆而坚决地粉碎了旧观念的束缚，"深圳市立博物馆以一种奇怪的、现代中国式的毛泽东主义轰动效应和超级资本主义视角的结合，讲述了这个城市的英文历史版本。"以市场化改革为突破口，他们摆脱了计划经济的枷锁，并逐步建立起新的管理体制。

这一切指的是在1980年夏末，深圳被设立为 "经济特区"，在那里几乎没有任何限制或控制，来自世界各地的企业将被邀请入驻。深圳作为一个实验区很有吸引力，不仅因为它离香港很近，有高效的港口和机场，而且还因为它离北京很远。如果实验出了问题，其后果在这个国家的最南端更容易得到控制。在深圳，几乎所有可能限制商业发展的规则都被改变或取消。建立了几个自由贸易加工区，材料和机器的进入和出口将被免除通常的关税或税收。

现代深圳具有美国人认为蓬勃发展的 "阳光地带 "城市所具有的特征--流动、粗犷、不拘小节、充满机会，以及曼彻斯特、底特律、芝加哥、洛杉矶在其发展最快时期的特征。报道深圳的报纸充满了毒品、犯罪和最拥挤的唐人区的罪恶故事，那里的墙壁和人行道上布满了喷漆的电话号码。有些是妓女的电话，但许多是小贩的电话，他们可以为寻求工作的人提供假的健康证明、文凭、居留证。

喜来登福朋酒店是深圳不断发展的过程中的一部分。当外国人准备从中国买东西时，这里是他们要去的地方之一。

来到上海的30多岁至50多岁的外国人通常是金融家、顾问或律师。他们往往很精干，有好的西装和发型。在北京的人通常是外交官、学者，或来自基金会或非政府组织。他们看起来不那么光鲜。深圳及其周边地区的情况则不同。这是一个国际群体--美国人、台湾人、欧洲人、日本人--的单一阶层。几乎所有的人都是来自外国公司的设计师、工程师或买家，他们来与中国的工厂主会面。这群人中的美国人往往比上海和北京的人群要强壮，而且看起来更像中西部人。有些人穿着公司的衬衫或尼龙夹克，口袋上有他们公司的标志。

当福朋餐厅在早上6:30开门时，外国人开始聚集在一起吃早餐，这是人们最渴望的一餐，也是他们的家乡菜。巨大的自助餐为所有来宾准备了早餐：对欧洲人来说，有切片的肉类和奶酪、优质面包、浓咖啡、麦片和酸奶。对日本人来说，腌菜、寿司、冷面、熏鳗鱼盖饭。对台湾人和其他中国人来说，馒头、点心、热粥麦片。对于美国人来说，他们的早餐是Denny's式的 "大满贯"：厚厚的华夫饼、鸡蛋、杂烩土豆、香肠、培根和火腿。我的妻子最后指责我在深圳花这么多时间只是为了吃早餐。

房间里很嘈杂，因为人们在讨论他们当天的计划，或会见将带领他们参观的中国工厂官员。到了九点，房间里的人明显减少，因为人们出去见他们的司机和面包车，一天的工厂参观和合同签署开始了。从我与其他客人的聊天中可以看出，在我去福朋酒店的所有行程中，我是唯一一个没有采购任务的人。

几乎每天早上都有一个人，一个41岁的爱尔兰单身汉，坐在福朋酒店的同一张桌子旁。很晚的时候，他也在那张桌子上吃饭。这张桌子靠近入口处，从那里可以观察到房间的其他地方。在一个典型的夜晚，他拥有的公司将在酒店预订10至15个房间，供前来与他做生意的外国访客使用。通常有几个人会和他一起吃饭。当服务员看到这个人到来时，他们会带来普通的西方食物--肉类、土豆--他们知道他对这些食物感兴趣。"你每天晚上都吃一样的东西吗？" 当我看到服务员对他的到来作出反射性反应时，我问他。"我不是为了吃而来的，"他回答。

这个人过去两年一直住在福朋酒店的公寓里，之前八年一直住在深圳周边的其他酒店。他特意告诉人们，他不会说中文--他说，大多数尝试过的商务访客都不得不努力应付语言，以至于忘记了他们正在谈判的内容。但在会议中的一些有用的地方，他就会加入中国的口语，这样人们就会怀疑他是否真的理解了所说的一切。(他告诉我他没有。）他的名字叫Liam Casey，我已经把他当成了 "中国先生"。

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中国先生：利亚姆-凯西站在组装笔记本电脑的工人旁边。
"中国先生 "是一个既定的开玩笑的荣誉称号，就像《人物》杂志的 "2003年最性感的男人"。自马可波罗时代以来，历届外国人都在非正式地竞争，以获得真正了解这个国家并能在这里做出成绩的人的认可。2005年，蒂姆-克利索德(Tim Clissold)的回忆录《中国先生》(Mr. China)令人捧腹，描述了一位年轻的英国金融家的心碎和挫折，他认为在中国刚刚对西方商业开放时，他能找出成功的秘诀。

Liam Casey在Tim Clissold受挫的地方获得了成功，但他很谨慎，没有表现得过于自信。"他说："当你认为你知道这里发生了什么的时候，就是你陷入危险的时候。"你看到市场上的一些新产品，你想知道它是在哪里生产的--结果发现是一个你五年来每天都开车经过的工厂，却从不知道里面发生了什么！"他说。你可以在这里呆这么久，但却知道得很少。" 但就我的目的而言，他是中国先生，因为他处于将世界的工作带到中国的重叠人流的中心。

当不在福朋酒店吃饭或睡觉时，凯西经营着一家他完全拥有的公司，有800名员工（其中50人来自爱尔兰、美国或其他十几个国家之一；其余为中国人），去年的销售额约为1.25亿美元。他身高适中，身材紧凑，有一头浓密的黑发和一张长脸，通常有一种不怀好意的表情。他有浓重的爱尔兰口音，穿着很随意。他走路、说话和行动都非常快，以至于我一般都是争先恐后地跟上。

凯西在科克城外的一个农场长大，高中毕业后没有受过正规教育，先是在科克和都柏林的服装店做销售员。他参与了从欧洲购买服装的工作，与一个朋友在爱尔兰建立了一个Crate & Barrel风格的商店，然后决定去旅行。29岁时，他来到南加州，在一家贸易公司短暂工作。他说他仍然会在美国--"拉古纳、纽波特海滩，啊，我喜欢那里"--但他无法获得绿卡或长期工作许可，也不想试图在那里隐居。

(我不妨在我从海外写的每一篇文章中都这样说。美国让有才华的外国人在那里工作和学习越容易，美国就会越富有、越强大、越受尊重。美国吸收世界人才的能力是其他文化无法比拟的关键优势--只要美国不因主要出于恐惧而制定的签证规则而放弃这一优势就可以了）。

因此，1996年，就在他30岁之后，凯西去了台北参加一个电子贸易展。这是他第一次去亚洲，他说，"我可以看到这就是机会所在。" 一年之内，他在深圳地区建立了业务，并成立了现在的PCH中国解决方案公司。首字母代表太平洋海岸公路，以纪念他在南加州的快乐时光。

这家公司是做什么的？简短的回答是外包，这实际上意味着将想要销售产品的外国公司与能够为其制造这些产品的中国供应商配对。凯西将他的任务描述为 "帮助创新者利用中国这里的制造供应链"。为了了解这一点，请考虑一下目前在中国南部汇聚的巨大人流，像凯西这样的公司帮助调解。

一个是巨大的人流，主要是年轻人和未受过教育的人，从中国的农场和村庄到深圳和类似城市。有些人在到达时已经由亲戚或修理工安排好工厂的工作；有些人来到城市，然后寻找工作。在电影版《巴尔扎克和中国小女裁缝》中，两个来自城市的青少年男子在山村结识了一个年轻女子，他们在文化大革命期间被送到山村进行休养。有一天，这个年轻女子意外地离开了。她去了 "大城市试试运气"，她的祖父告诉他们。"她说她想要一种新的生活。新的生活是在深圳。

乘以数百万倍，也许缺乏巴尔扎克故事的具体戏剧性，这就是工厂镇的故事。与小说中一样，许多移民是年轻女性。在我在珠江三角洲和上海周围看到的轻工制造业中，劳动力主要是女性。与工厂签约，基本上意味着把工作当作自己的生命。来到沿海大型工厂中心的工人，要么像那个小女裁缝一样，在有配偶或孩子之前就来到这里，要么把他们的家属留在家里，由祖父母、姑姑或叔叔照顾。在电子和日用品工厂，包括我见过的许多工厂，工资是每月900至1200元人民币，或约115至155美元。在工人离开的村庄里，一个农户每年的现金收入可能是几千元人民币。在台湾或中国大陆公司拥有和管理的工厂，工资一般最低，纪律也最严明。巨大的富士康（由其创始人、台湾的郭台铭经营）以军事化的组织和方法而闻名。西方公司的工作是最便宜的，但也很罕见，因为欧洲和美国的大公司主要从当地的分包商那里购买。凯西说，他拥有的一些工厂的月薪比当地的平均水平高几百元人民币。他的目标是保留工人的时间比标准的几年时间更长，让他们发展更多的技能和对公司精神的认识。

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上海英业达工厂的工人在检查电脑主板
工厂的工作时间通常为12小时，通常有两次吃饭的休息时间（有补贴或免费），每周六或七天。每当工作放松的时候--如果装配线因某种原因停工，如果工人在吃饭休息时有空闲--许多人就把头放在他们面前的桌子上，似乎马上就睡着了。中国法律规定，标准工作周为40小时，因此这意味着大量的加班，这已包括在上述工资标准中。由于他们的家乡可能要坐几天的火车和汽车，来自内陆地区的工人通常每年只回去一次。他们都是在同一时间去的--在 "春节 "或中国新年期间，这时港口和工厂实际上关闭了一周左右，全国的交通系统被堵塞。"这里的人工作很努力，"一家美资工厂的美国经理告诉我。"他们很年轻。他们很敏捷。没有那种'我必须去接孩子'的废话，你在美国得到的。"

在我看到的每一家电子厂，装配线上的每个人都有一堆文件贴在她的工作站旁：她的照片、姓名和员工编号，通常还有她要遵循的中英文说明。通常也有一个明显的标志，显示她做得如何。对于整个生产线来说，每小时都有目标和实际产量的总数，以及允许的和实际的缺陷水平。在我见过的几家台资工厂里，个人表现的指标是一幅带有树叶的幼稚轮廓图。每天轮班后，树上的一片叶子要用彩色笔填上，可以是红色也可以是绿色。如果叶子是绿色的，说明工人已经完成了她的配额，没有造成任何问题。如果是红色的，说明缺陷已经被追溯到她的工作站。每月一片红叶在可承受范围内；两片则是一个问题。

正如以前所有伟大的工业化浪潮一样，许多人最终留在了城里；这就是为什么深圳已经发展得如此之大。但比起美国或英国工厂工作的蓬勃发展，许多农村人，特别是年轻妇女，工作了两三年，然后带着他们的积蓄回到了农村。他们在村里开店，与当地男子结婚并建立家庭，购买土地，或用他们的收入帮助仍在家中的亲戚。

工厂里的生活显然是艰苦的，在重工业工作中是非常危险的。在弗吉尼亚理工大学有32人被谋杀的同一周，北方一家钢铁厂的32名中国工人因一勺熔化的钢水意外倾倒在他们身上而被烫死了。即使在中国的报纸上，这个故事得到的报道也比美国的枪击案要少--致命的煤矿灾难是如此普遍，以至于它们被当作交通事故死亡来报道。相比之下，中国南方典型的轻工业是乏味的，但没有那么明显的危险。正如台湾一家电子厂的工头在我问他工作条件是否恶劣时所说的那样："你见过中国的农场吗？" 一位在中国工作的美国工业设计师告诉我，一位美国学者参观了他的工厂，看到年轻的女工被锁在工位上，感到非常震惊。她看到的实际上是大多数电子厂必须使用的接地线。装配线上的每个人的手腕上都有一个维可牢带，它与工作台面相连，以避免可能破坏计算机芯片的静电积聚。

如此多的人都在运动，使深圳和周边地区有一种无根的、短暂的品质。中国南方的自然语言是粤语，但在工厂城市，通用语言是普通话，这是来自中国不同地区的人最有可能分享的语言。"我不喜欢这里，"一位来自北京的中国经理告诉我，他被派往深圳工作已经三年了。"没有根或文化。" "在我来到这里的头几个星期，我认为这里没有灵魂，"利亚姆-凯西谈到这个已经成为他家的城市时说。"但就像任何快速发展的地方一样，活动就是特色。这就像纽约。你到达机场后去市中心，当你从出租车上下来时，没有人知道你从哪里来。你可能在那里呆了一个小时，你可能在那里呆了10年--没有人可以知道。这里也是如此，这让人兴奋。" 凯西告诉我，对他来说，上海感觉很慢，"是为游客准备的"。的确，我经常惊讶地发现，人们在上海的人行道上漫步而不是大步流星。这是一个繁忙的城市，行人速度很慢。或者说，凯西的观念是会传染的。

进入深圳和类似城市的另一个巨大流量是那些前来设厂的企业家。深圳的自由化与其说是为了促进任何一个行业，不如说是为了使一般的企业能够容易起步。

许多被优惠政策吸引的企业家来自台湾，台湾经济的特点是小型的，主要是家庭拥有的公司，就像现在在中国南部的那些公司。总体而言，中国大陆的发展模式比日本或韩国更接近台湾。在所有这些国家和整个东亚地区，政府使用许多工具来最大化工业产出：税收政策、贸易规则、货币价值等等。但日本和韩国的政策倾向于强调大型的、全国性的冠军企业的福利--三菱和丰田，幸运金星和三星--而台湾的出口商是成千上万的小公司，其中有几个成长为大公司。当然，中国比其他国家的总和还要大，但它的出口导向型公司却很小。造成原子化的一个原因是普遍存在的不信任和腐败，加上不稳定的法治。即使是中国最大的出口商富士康，在去年的《财富》全球500强企业名单中也只排在第206位。当外国人在进入日本或韩国市场时遇到困难，往往是因为他们遇到了保护大型、知名的当地利益的障碍。中国的问题通常是相反的。外国人不知道从哪里开始，也不知道在混乱的、没有区别的小公司中应该和谁打交道。

对我来说，中国系统的碎片化性质在深圳的另一个令人惊叹的景象中得到了体现：SEG电子市场，一个七层楼高的市中心建筑，其每一寸都挤满了数百家母婴电子经销商的销售摊位。"我在美国做梦都买不到的芯片，我只有在晚上才会梦到的稀有陶瓷电容的卷轴！" 来自麻省理工学院的华裔美国电子学博士Andrew "Bunnie" Huang在参观后在他的博客中写道。"我的感觉刺痛，我的头在旋转。当我走到下一个角落，看到从地板到天花板堆满了可能有一亿个电阻和电容的商店时，我无法抑制期待的笑脸。" 正如他所指出的，"在向北一小时的车程内 "有数百家工厂，它们可以 "接受任何电子产品的想法，并将其按字面意义上的一船进行生产。" 这个市场部分是永久性的贸易展览，部分是为那些突然需要一些电容器或连接器用于原型或最后一刻的项目的人提供的供应站，部分是贸易商卸下剩余元件的交换会。

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工厂工人在去深圳工作的路上
最后一个进入深圳的人流，使其他人流成为可能，这就是福朋的代表：来自高工资国家的买家，他们决定要利用，而不是与低成本的中国制造商竞争。这就是我们的中国先生，以及其他像他一样的人，适合的地方。

这也是一个面纱落下的地方。在几十年的军事报道中，我很少遇到像在深圳和类似城市开会的买家和供应商这样关心保密的人。他们致力于保护什么信息？姓名、地点和产品编号，这些信息会透露哪些西方公司从哪些中国供应商那里获得了哪些确切的产品。他们的担忧有高低两方面的原因。

低端的原因是 "耐克问题"。这是买家希望将他们的品牌与一般的外包，特别是与亚洲血汗工厂的联系降到最低，这是因为耐克在印度尼西亚的工厂导致了公关问题。按照中国的标准，最成功的出口工厂是严厉的，而不是虐待的，但这些并不是西方客户可能适用的标准。

高路的原因涉及到 "供应链 "的关键运营重要性。找到合适的工厂，制定正确的制造系统，确保正确的零件和原材料供应，实施正确的质量标准，并发展正确的信任和可靠性关系，这并不容易。已经解决了这些问题的公司不愿意告诉他们的竞争对手他们是如何做到的。"供应链是知识产权"，这是利亚姆-凯西的说法。要求一家西方公司说明其中国供应商的情况，就像要求记者交出他最好的消息来源的名单。

因为对供应链的保密对买家来说非常重要，所以他们试图将保密性强加给他们的供应商。当一家外部公司的设计和质量声誉很高时--索尼、博朗、苹果--许多中国承包商喜欢暗示他们是其供应链的一部分。但是，如果他们想保留购买公司的信任（和业务），那些真正属于它的人必须更加谨慎。

因此，我将隐瞒细节，但要求你做这样的跳跃：如果你想到以下业务中的主要美国或欧洲品牌，他们的产品有可能来自我将要描述的那些工厂。这些企业是：计算机，包括台式机、笔记本电脑和服务器；电信设备，从路由器到移动电话；音频设备，包括任何与MP3有关的东西、家庭立体声系统、大多数便携式设备和耳机；各种视频设备，从相机和摄像机到回放设备；个人护理用品和高端专业目录商品；医疗设备；体育用品和运动设备；任何种类的电子产品或配件；以及，几乎所有你能想到的其他东西。我所举的一些例子来自深圳的工厂，但其他例子来自上海、杭州、广州、厦门和其他地方附近的设施。

为什么外国公司会来找我们的中国先生？我问凯西，如果我在，比如说，在匹兹堡的某个钢铁行业的分支，并希望削减成本，他会告诉我什么。"不感兴趣，"他说。"产品太重了，而且你可能已经实现了流程自动化，所以一个人在按一个按钮。如果让人在中国按按钮，你的成本几乎一样高。"

但他说，他感兴趣的是，一个公司已经建立了品牌名称和与零售商的关系，并知道下一步要推广和销售什么，而且需要在制造需要相当数量的组装的产品时节省时间和金钱。"这就是我们可以提供帮助的地方，因为你来到这里，会看到比你在美国或德国合作的工厂更好的工厂。"

这里有几个例子，都是基于真实世界的案例。你已经宣布了一个重要的新产品，在媒体上引起了很大反响。但在接近发布时间时，你发现了一个必须修复的设计问题，而美国的工厂无法及时调整其生产流程。

中国的工厂能更快地做出反应，而不仅仅是因为12小时的工作时间。"在其他地方，你必须进口不同的原材料和部件，"凯西告诉我。"在这里，你在一英里内有九个不同的供应商，他们可以在当天下午把样品带过来。人们认为中国很便宜，但实际上，它很快速。" 此外，与富裕国家的同行相比，中国的工厂使用更多的人力，而较少使用昂贵的机器人或装配机。"人是最能适应的机器，"一位在中国工作的美国工业设计师告诉我。"机器需要被重新编程。你可以让人们在下周做一些完全不同的事情。"

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在深圳SEG电子市场的一个展位上，用马提尼酒杯展示的芯片电阻。
或者：你是一个美国发明家，有一个你认为有 "绿色 "潜力的家庭能源节约产品。但你需要快速将其推向市场，因为你认为大公司可能正在尝试同样的东西，而且你需要达到100美元的目标零售价。"除了中国，没有地方可以做这个，"中国先生说，他向我展示了成品。

或者：你是一家非常有名的美国公司，你担心你在美国的几个供应站为零售店保持库存占用了太多资金。在中国先生的帮助下，你开始在你的网站上强调直接零售，并从一个由深圳的年轻中国妇女经营的供应站进行所有的运输和履行，她们可以直接向特定的零售店发货。

在反复访问深圳--早餐！--以及访问其他制造业地区的过程中，我听到了许多类似的案例，看到了一些使西方国家有可能将中国视为其制造业中心地带的工具。

有些涉及计算机化的知识。凯西的PCH有一个类似谷歌地球的系统，其中包含了他在与中国分包商打交道的10年中所学到的东西。你说出你想生产的产品--比如说，一个新的手机外壳或耳机。凯西点击地图，显示出能够生产必要部件的公司，以及它们之间在旅行时间上的确切距离。这是一个来之不易的知识，在这个地区，城市地图一经出版就会过时，地址也是近似的。(凯西的地址是用GPS坐标键入的，是他在访问每家工厂时从装有GPS的手机上悄悄读出的）。如果一家工厂看起来很有前途，你再点击一下，就会得到内部和外部的照片，管理方面的简介，在某些情况下，还有装配线运行的视频，以及他们已经完成的订单的规格表和工程图纸。类似的程序使凯西和他的客户能够看到他们的产品在世界任何地方的哪艘船、哪架飞机或哪辆卡车上，以及任何仓库或车厂的库存数量。(他们是怎么知道的？每件成品和几乎每个部件都有一个单独的条形码，几乎每次接触都会被扫描）。

凯西监控的工厂的工作流程有很大的不同，尽管它们的外观并不一样。我认为中国的工厂只有一套蓝图：一个大的、方方正正的、看起来像仓库的结构，通常由混凝土制成，通常有五层；外面是白色或灰色；相对大的窗户，这是你如何将它与工人的宿舍区分开来的；高的天花板，以容纳机器。但在里面，有些是高度自动化的，而有些则惊人地依赖手工劳动。我甚至不说在中国北方经常发现的那些糟糕的、危险的、过时的工厂，那里到处都是毛泽东时代遗留下来的重工业大块头。即使是一些新建的设施，也将西方几十年来一直由机器完成的工作留给了人类。想象一下，打开一个消费品--手机、电动牙刷、无线路由器--发现一个被扣上或粘上的零件。它可能是由一个年轻的中国妇女放在那里的，在她12小时的工作时间里，她每分钟要做很多次同样的事情。

我可以描述许多装置，但我被两个装置所吸引。第一个代表了自动化的一个极端。它由英业达公司拥有和经营，英业达公司是设在台湾的五家公司之一，这些公司共同生产了世界上任何地方以任何品牌销售的绝大多数笔记本电脑和笔记本。美国人都听说过戴尔、索尼、康柏、惠普、联想-IBM ThinkPad、苹果、NEC、Gateway、东芝。几乎没有人听说过广达、仁宝、英业达、纬创、华硕。然而，以著名品牌名称销售的笔记本电脑和笔记本中，有近90%实际上是由这五家公司之一在中国大陆的工厂生产的。我曾看到一家工厂有三个 "竞争 "品牌的产品从同一生产线上下来。

我看到的英业达的装置是在上海专门为该公司设立的出口加工区，在那里，用于制造的进口部件和用于出口的成品都免于通常的关税或税收。它每天生产超过30,000台笔记本电脑，使用上述品牌之一。每天，同一园区内的英业达工厂生产数百台大型名牌服务器电脑，用于运行互联网流量。

这就是今天的福特汽车公司的老红河工厂的粗糙对应物。在Rouge的全盛时期，橡胶、钢铁和其他原材料会进入工厂，而汽车成品会出来。在这里，每天都有赤裸裸的绿色电路板、电容器、芯片组和其他部件进入，然后笔记本电脑就出来了。一些先进的部件已经组装好了：来自台湾或新加坡的磁盘驱动器，来自韩国或日本的LCD屏幕，来自中国其他工厂的键盘和电源。

整个过程看起来就像你期望的高科技装配线一样。传送带和机器人将不断发展的计算机从一个工位送到另一个工位；每个单元在工人完成前一个单元后的一瞬间到达她的面前。在一个部件进入机器之前，它的条形码被扫描，以确保它是正确的部件；在它被添加之后，机器被 "检查称重"，以查看它的新重量是否正确。数以百计的微小晶体管、芯片和其他电子零件由 "取放 "机器人连接到每块电路板上，其多条手臂的移动速度几乎快到无法跟随。电路板上的焊缝用激光进行扫描，以寻找缺陷。任何有问题的焊缝都被放在一边，由女性专家通过巨大的放大镜进行重新焊接。这家工厂为什么要在机器人和机床上投资这么多？我问一位来自台湾的主管。他的回答是："人做得不够精确"。这些工厂不是把太贵的东西自动化，而是把人类无法完成的太精细的东西自动化。

许多笔记本电脑都是在网上订购的，当它们接近完成时，每台都会根据其目的地进行 "调味"。在我访问的那天，有一台要去东京，安装了日语键盘，并在机箱上的适当位置贴上了日语标识；下一台则是要去美国。显示屏安装完毕后，每台电脑都沿着工厂的天花板在一种赛道上运行，在那里运行几个小时，以确保所有部件都能正常工作。然后，传送带把它送到最后的调味步骤--"烧入 "操作系统，在我访问的时候，操作系统是Windows Vista，有多种语言版本。一位工程师指出，由于Vista需要的磁盘空间是Windows XP的10倍，因此必须改变装配线，以允许更长、更慢地通过刻录站。

另一个让我感兴趣的设施是利亚姆-凯西在深圳的一个工厂，为一家不同的知名美国公司处理在线订单。我是在黎明时分去的，那是关键时刻。由于与美国东海岸有12个小时的时差，美国人下午下的订单在夜深人静时才到达中国。就在我观察的时候，伊利诺伊州帕拉廷的一位顾客，也许是在办公室购物，点击了美国公司的网站，订购了两个25美元的配件。几秒钟后，订单出现在7800英里外的深圳的屏幕上。它自动生成了一张包装和地址单以及几个条形码标签。一位年轻女子将地址标签贴在一个棕色纸板运输箱上，并将包装单放在里面。箱子沿着传送带移动到另一位妇女手中，她负责 "轻取 "系统。她站在一种橱柜前，橱柜上有一个单独的敞口箱，用于存放客户可能从网站上订购的每件物品；每个存放最新订单中指定部件的箱子上都有一盏灯亮着。她从箱子里挑出物品，经过扫描仪检查其编号（并示意灯熄灭），然后把它放进箱子里。接下来是更多的检查称重和重新扫描，当箱子被密封后，年轻人把它加到一个运输托盘上。

当夜班人员准备离开时，中国时间上午8点，帕拉廷的晚上7点，美国东海岸的晚上8点，来自美国的订单量正在逐渐减少。更重要的是，联邦快递的取件时间越来越近。上午9点，快递员将到达，并将货盘赶往香港机场。联邦快递飞往安克雷奇的航班将在下午6点前起飞，当它到达那里时，该公司托盘上的货物将与其他中国出口货物合并，并重新分拣到美国的目的地。在帕拉廷的男子在他的电脑上点击 "立即购买！"的48小时后，货物出现在他家门口。它的返回地址是美国的一个公司仓库；箱子底部有一个小小的中国制造的标签。

在深圳，早上8点，上夜班的年轻妇女从流水线上站起来，摘下她们一直戴着的帽子和发网，甩了甩黑发。她们通过了工作间门口的金属探测器（进出都要通过），走到楼下放置自行车的架子上。他们穿着红色的公司夹克，这是他们工作制服的一部分--作为非正式的制服，几乎每个人都穿着紧身低腰的蓝色牛仔裤，缝隙上有刺绣或亮片。他们中的大多数人骑着自行车回到宿舍；其他人则是步行，或骑着自行车，互相聊天。那天晚上，他们将回到工作岗位上。与此同时，成群结队的红顶蓝底的日班女青年挤满了道路，骑着自行车过来。

对我们有好处--暂时的
我们应该如何看待这个问题？证据表明，我没有想到的是：到目前为止，这种互动对大多数参与者都有好处。

工厂热潮对中国有好处吗？当然是的。是的，它创造了环境压力，如果不加以控制，可能会使中国和世界不再有污染。国家政府目前的五年计划--即到2010年的第11个五年计划--将中国发展成为一个 "和谐社会 "作为其核心主题，或称 "和谐社会"，这句话从中国领导人那里听到的频率就像从美国那里听到的 "全球反恐战争 "一样。在中国，这句话是试图处理收入不平等问题的代号，特别是农民和数以百万计的农民工的苦难。但它也是至少谈及保护环境的代号。

而且，是的，在整个中国的繁荣时期，许多人被虐待，被压迫，有时在工厂里工作到死。即使那些没有被虐待的人也可能是孤独和迷失的，对国家的社会结构产生了破坏性影响。但是，这也是英国和美国的故事，当他们建立他们的伟大工业，他们伟大的动荡的工业城市，以及最终他们伟大的工业中产阶级。对中国来说，这远远不是该国在过去50年中所经历的最严重的社会动荡。至少这次动荡，与50年代灾难性的大跃进和60年代及70年代初的文化大革命不同，对个人和国家有一些好处。

一些西方人可能觉得，即使是今天 "正常 "的中国工作条件也相当于奴隶劳动--每月100美元，没有工厂以外的生活，工作时间太长，除了在拥挤的宿舍里努力睡觉之外，几乎没有时间做更多事情。这里有一个令人不舒服的事实，我正在等待一些中国官员指出来。在深圳工作的内陆妇女的经济状况可以说比在芝加哥靠最低工资生活的美国人更好。她可以把赚到的钱大部分存起来，并觉得自己在往上爬；而美国人则不能，也不可能。在未来两年，美国的最低工资预计将上升到每小时7.25美元。假设每周工作40小时，那就是每月不到1200美元，或大约是中国工厂工资的10倍。但这是在扣除工资和食品及住房费用之前，这些费用在中国的工厂城镇是免费或有补贴的。

中国的发言人确实对他们的经济提出了一个不同的观点，而且他们经常提出这个观点，以至于西方的听众很想把它忽略。他们说，"无论我们做了什么，我们已经让数亿人摆脱了贫困。" 这是真的，这很重要，而制造业出口的繁荣是中国如何做到这一点的重要部分。这种经济上的成功显然不能证明该政权所做的一切是正确的，尤其是它对一党统治的任何挑战的压制。但这一成就的规模是不容忽视的。就所有数十亿美元的外国援助和世界银行的监督而言，至少在过去的半个世纪里，对世界上最多的以前贫困的人来说，最大的好处是在中国实现的，这主要归功于外包热潮。

向中国的转移对美国公司有好处吗？答案似乎是肯定的，否则，他们为什么要去那里？可以想象，糟糕的合作关系、被盗的知识产权、品牌稀释、物流噩梦或其他困难让许多公司对外包产生了反感；我从外国高管那里听到了各种类型的例子。但我从他们那里听到的更有趣的主题，解释了为什么他们愿意克服这些不便，涉及到一个叫做 "微笑曲线 "的东西。

该曲线因1970年代的笑脸图标的U形弧线而得名，它从一个产品的创造和销售的开始到结束。在开始的时候是公司的品牌。惠普、西门子、戴尔、诺基亚、苹果。接下来是产品的创意：一个iPod，一台新电脑，一个摄像手机。之后是高水平的工业设计--构想产品的外观和工作方式。然后是详细的工程设计，说明产品将如何制造。然后是必要的部件。然后是实际的制造和装配。然后是运输和分销。然后是零售销售。最后是服务合同和零件及配件的销售。

重要的是，中国的活动是在中间阶段--制造，加上一些组件供应和工程设计--但美国的活动是在两端，而这些是赚钱的地方。笑脸曲线显示了每个阶段的利润率或附加值，品牌和产品概念的起点很高，制造的起点很低，而在零售和服务阶段又有所上升。简单地说，真正的钱是在品牌和零售方面，这听起来很明显，但它的含义是有启发性的。

在我访问的每一家工厂，我都要求经理们估计产品的销售价格有多少最终落入谁的手中。品牌名称的力量是最重要的变量。如果一个产品足够特别，其品牌名称足够吸引人，它可以获得如此高的价格，零售商可能会保留一半的收入。(想想看，一件阿玛尼西装，一杯星巴克拿铁咖啡。）大多数电子产品现在都受到更激烈的价格竞争，因为购物者很容易在互联网上找到便宜货。因此，我在一家现代工厂看到的普通Windows风格的笔记本电脑在美国可能要卖到1000美元左右，而零售商只保留不到50美元。

其余的钱去了哪里？那家工厂的经理猜测，英特尔和微软加起来会得到大约300美元，而显示屏、磁盘存储设备和其他电子元件的制造商可能会得到150美元左右。键盘制造商将得到15或20美元；联邦快递或UPS将得到稍少一点。当所有其他成本被计算在内时，可能有30到40美元--占总额的3%到4%--会留在中国的工厂主和装配线上的年轻妇女那里。

其他例子。一家大名鼎鼎的西方公司生产的一个音频设备的手提箱，售价不到30美元。该公司向中国供应商支付每个箱子6美元，其中大约一半用于购买材料。另外的24美元则由该大牌公司保留。另一个美国品牌音频设备的类似耳机的配件，售价也在30美元左右。我被告知，其中3美元留在了中国。我看到一套高端以太网连接线。这种电缆在美国以三种形式出售，规格完全相同，但有三种不同的包装：作为一种特殊产品，作为全国性办公用品商店的一个品牌，以及在eBay上没有品牌。专业品牌的零售价为29.95美元，连锁店的零售价为19.95美元，而eBay上的零售价为15.95美元。制造这些产品的深圳地区的公司每件可得2美元。

如果重点不清楚的话：年薪1000美元的中国工人一直在帮助每周赚取1000美元（甚至更多）的美国设计师、营销人员、工程师和零售商赚取更多。此外，他们还帮助了美国公司的股东。

所有这些都不包括一个现象，这将是未来文章的主题。中国将其贸易盈余转化为大量的美元计价的储备。每个人都明白，从短期来看，中国对其储备的处理给美国带来了便利。通过在美国股票和债券市场投放超过1万亿美元的资金，它支撑起了美国经济。资产价格比原来要高；利率降低了，不管是对购买抵押贷款的美国家庭，还是对为不断增加的联邦债务提供资金的美国纳税人。美元的跌幅也比原来要小--这在短期内有助于美国消费者继续购买中国商品。

每个人都明白，从长远来看，中国必须改变这一政策。它自己的人民需要太多的东西--学校、医院、铁路--它要继续把利润送到美国。它不会永远把它的储蓄沉入一种几乎可以保证对人民币持续下跌的货币--美元。今年，中央政府成立了一个委员会，考虑中国储备的正确长期用途。没人想到建议会是这样。继续购买美元。每个人都想知道的是，这种变化将如何发生，何时发生，会是什么，会有什么后果。

迄今为止，中国发展的另一个方面有助于美国公司与之打交道。这是一个事实，到目前为止，中国在关键方面与美国以前的亚洲伟大挑战者不同。日本。美国人已将日本经济视为一种笑话，主要是因为东京证券交易所近20年来一直处于低迷状态。尽管如此，日本仍然是世界第二大经济体。丰田汽车已经超过通用汽车，成为最大的汽车制造商；日本的出口商不断增加电子产品和其他高价值商品的销售；日本制度的长期逻辑，即消费者和投资者遭受损失，以便生产者可以繁荣发展，仍然保持不变。

在20世纪80年代贸易摩擦加剧的时候，日本已经是一个富裕的现代国家，就像中国仍然不是一样。更重要的是，其领先的公司经常与美国成熟的高价值、高科技公司进行正面竞争。富士通对抗IBM，东芝对抗英特尔，富士对抗柯达，索尼和松下对抗摩托罗拉，等等。日本公司的收益往往意味着美国公司的直接损失--无论这些公司是被视为呆板和缺乏创新的公司，如底特律公司，还是技术上灵活和先进的公司，如半导体制造商。

目前，中国的情况是不同的。中国的公司很多，但规模很小。联想和青岛是其两个全球公认的品牌。但联想之所以为人所知，主要是因为它从IBM购买了ThinkPad品牌，而青岛啤酒有四分之一的股份为安海斯-布什公司所有。中国的出口商在为西方公司工作，而不是与之对抗时表现得最好，就像富士康（与众多小型公司一样）在与苹果合作时一样。虽然中国政府显然希望加强国家的品牌--例如，它希望通过一家飞机公司与波音和空客竞争--但其 "产业规划 "主要采取的形式不是具体的目标，而是一般的商业促进，如将公司带到深圳的激励措施。

中国的经济，从技术上讲仍然是社会主义的，也奇怪地比日本更开放。在二战后头四十年的增长中，日本基本上对外国所有权和投资是关闭的。(德州仪器和IBM是两个备受关注的例外情况）。相比之下，中国的工业繁荣是在世界贸易组织时代发生的，中国于2001年加入该组织。根据WTO规则，中国有义务在其发展的早期阶段向外国投资和所有权开放。中国的出口繁荣一直是由外国公司主导的。中国充斥着知识盗版、隐性贸易壁垒和其他障碍。但总的来说，外国经济体或外国公司比日本更难从中国的贸易政策中获得损害。

当我在日本生活时，经历了80年代末的繁荣，我在这本杂志上认为，日本的行为说明了一些伟大的历史真相，而经济模型不容易包括在内。有时社会追求的目标并不是经济学家认为的理性目标：消费者福利的最大可能增长。美国主要在战时是这样，但在追求被认为符合国家利益的军事化项目时也是如此：修建州际公路，将人送入太空，也许有一天会开发替代能源供应。几十年来，日本的情况一直是这样的。

对于任何学过生态学101的人来说，自然的反应是。这就是他们的问题！他们正在为每个人制造高质量的产品。他们正在为其他人制造高质量的产品，所以有什么不喜欢的呢？但在过去十年中，越来越多值得尊敬的经济学家认为，情况并不那么简单。如果一个国家刻意促进高科技和高价值产业，那么它最终会拥有比其他国家更多的这些产业，以及与之相关的更多高薪工作。这在经济上并不 "合理"--欧洲国家为他们通过空客创造的每个工作岗位付出了沉重的代价。但是，与没有空客的竞争相比，波音公司销售的飞机和雇佣的工程师可能更少。美国不必效仿欧洲的做法，也不必效仿日本的做法。但它需要意识到它们，以及可能的后果。(麻省理工学院的保罗-萨缪尔森、普林斯顿大学的艾伦-布林德和威廉-鲍莫尔，以及阿尔弗雷德-P-斯隆基金会的负责人拉尔夫-戈莫里，都以不同的侧重点提出了这一论点）。

与日本相比，中国的行为及其公司的行为更容易与标准经济理论相匹配。到目前为止，像在喜来登福朋酒店达成的交易主要对各方都有好处。中国家庭有了新的生活机会。美国客户有了更广泛的选择。美国投资者有更好的回报。但是，当然，也有复杂的情况。

首先是全世界可见的社会效应，为了向中国共产党的过去致敬，我们可以称之为 "矛盾的激化"。全球贸易涉及一个巨大的矛盾。资金、产品和思想流动的障碍越低，人们住在哪里就越不重要。但由于大多数人不能从一个国家移动到另一个国家，人们住在哪里总是很重要。在一个无摩擦、完全全球化的贸易世界里，人们平均来说都会更富有--但每个社会都会包括比现在更广泛的阶层、舒适度和福祉。那些拥有最适销对路的全球人才将更加富有，因为他们可以向最大的市场出售。其他所有人都会更穷，因为来自数十亿劳动力的竞争。在没有贸易壁垒的情况下，没有理由让荷兰的普通人比印度的普通人过得更好。每个社会都将包含世界上整个收入分配的一个截面--但其人民必须生活在同一国界内。

我们现在还远远没有达到这个程度。但是，美国和中国经济的日益一体化将两国推向了这一点。这对中国来说或多或少都是好事，但对美国来说并不全是好事。它意味着主要为那些已经成功的人带来经济利益，为那些已经处于劣势的人带来更艰难的上升之路，并对已经被削弱的同胞之情和共享机会的感觉造成进一步的压力，而这种感觉使一个像美国这样多样化和不平等的社会得以凝聚。

另一个问题是，中国的商业和政府领导人都很清楚微笑曲线对他们的影响。是的，有年薪1000美元的工作总比没有好。但如果能有年薪数倍于此的工作，并且处于曲线上更理想的位置，那就更好了。如果美国处于中国的位置，它将尽一切可能将更多的高价值工作引入其境内--当然，这正是中国正在努力做的。你在任何地方都能看到一个例子。

仅举几例。在中国的最北部，英特尔刚刚同意建立一个大型芯片制造厂，提供高端工程和设计工作，而不仅仅是装配线上的座位。在北京，微软和谷歌都开设了真正的研究中心，而不仅仅是为当地市场服务的办公室。在深圳，利亚姆-凯西的公司正在创建工业设计中心，在那里，产品将被构思，而不仅仅是被组装起来。最近，上海的工厂区正在被绅士化；当地政府正在推动工厂搬迁到10英里以外，这样他们的建筑就可以变成白领的工程和设计中心。

目前，我看到工厂里的年轻女性从事的大多数工作都不是从美国 "抢 "来的，因为在美国，这些装配类的工作会由机器完成。但中国的目标当然是朝着更有利可图的方向发展。

与我交谈过的许多人说，中国工业的攀升将是缓慢的，因为他们在使其设计、管理和品牌工作达到世界标准方面还有很长的路要走。"麦肯锡亚太业务主席Dominic Barton告诉我："想想看--全球公司都有来自印度的CEO和高管，但很少有中国人。他说，主要原因是中国拥有足够外语技能和海外工作经验的高管人数有限。加州知名设计公司IDEO的亚太区总经理安迪-斯韦基（Andy Switky）将中国人对质量控制的经常性看法描述为 "乐于接受糟糕的结果"。这使得他们很难超越当地的低价值市场。"即使现在在中国，大多数人都没有iPod或笔记本电脑，"一家台资音响设备工厂的经理告诉我。"因此，他们更难想出改进的办法，甚至无法区分好坏。" 这些和其他因素可能会减缓中国的进步。但这是美国人希望的一个薄弱的基础。

美国人最常讨论的与中国打交道的措施，作为希望的长期基础，并没有好多少。是的，现在人民币对美元的汇率被低估了。是的，这使得中国的出口比它们本来的价格更便宜。是的，人民币的价值应该上升--而且会上升。但在任何可以想象的程度上，它都不会将那些深圳的工作带回俄亥俄州。充其量，它将使美国的出口，从机车和高科技医疗设备到葡萄酒和软件，更具吸引力。这种商业上的胜利是重要的，但如果中国不加快人民币汇率的攀升，就不可能通过威胁征收报复性关税来推动这些胜利。此外，美元兑人民币汇率下跌得越快，中国当局可能会更快地将其资产从美元转移到更强的货币。

今年，美国政府对从中国进口的光面纸征收特别关税，称为反补贴税。这是一种用于印刷杂志和目录的纸张，从2004年到2006年，中国对美国的出口增长了10倍。美国政府说，有必要征收关税，以抵消中国制造商通过低成本贷款、税收减免和其他优惠获得的出口补贴。根据世贸组织规则，禁止各种出口补贴；美国官员、学者和贸易团体已经编制了事实上的补贴清单，将中国商品对美国消费者的价格降低25%、40%，甚至更多。(中国人--像欧洲人、澳大利亚人和其他国家的人--很快就反驳说，美国也补贴了许多产品，特别是大规模农场的出口产品。）

这显然是重要的。但再想想那些零售价为29.95美元的以太网连接器，其制造成本仅为2美元。如果取消所有可以想象的补贴，可能会将制造成本推高到3美元。假设它上升到4美元，这将对外包给中国的公司的决策产生很大影响--他们可以提高零售价格吗？他们必须接受较低的利润率吗？他们是否应该在越南建立下一个工厂？但这不会使任何人将生产带回美国。

政府政策和偏袒可能在中国巨大的道路建设和土地开发政策中发挥了很大作用，但它们似乎是外包热潮中的次要因素。例如，当我问中国先生我应该尝试采访深圳当地政府的哪些官员以了解他们如何与公司合作时，他说他不知道。他从未见过任何官员。

美国人对人民币、补贴和其他中国做法的抱怨有一个共同点：他们认为贸易关系长期紧张的解决方案在于中国方面的变化。我认为这种假设是天真的。如果美国对其与中国互动的影响不满意，那是美国的问题，不是中国的问题。想象美国可以通过唠叨、威胁或引诱来阻止中国追求自己的经济野心是在愚弄我们自己。如果一个国家不喜欢它与世界的商业交易条件，它需要改变自己的政策，而不是期望世界改变。中国就是这样做的，对它自己有利--而且，直到现在，对美国有利。

我们是否对正在被全球经济力量塑造的美国感到不舒服？这种不平等？一些人的权利感？其他人的机会被扼杀？人们普遍担心今天的趋势--借贷、消费、向内看、消耗基础设施--将使我们明天难以保持领先，特别是在中国方面？如果是这样，这些趋势本身，以及它们背后的美国选择，是美国人可以解决的。它们不是中国的问题，也不是深圳人的错。

詹姆斯-法洛斯是《大西洋》杂志的特约撰稿人，也是通讯《突发新闻》的作者。他曾是吉米-卡特总统的白宫演讲稿撰写人，并与他的妻子黛博拉-法洛斯共同创建了我们的城镇公民基金会。