【英语中国】中国经济能否转型？

There has been much talk about Asia's rising middle class and the development of a new model based on domestic consumption. So far that is all it has been: talk. The plain fact is – the dazzling retail emporiums of Asia's up-and-coming cities aside – the region has become more, not less, dependent on foreign demand.

A decade ago, when Asia was in the midst of its home-grown crisis, exports accounted for 37 per cent of regional output. Partly in reaction to that shock, which exposed an over-reliance on flows of foreign capital, economies ramped up their production of manufactured goods. A decade later, overseas shipments accounted for 47 per cent of output.

Asia's heightened reliance on external demand has been masked. In many countries, particularly China, consumption has conspicuously risen; people have been trading in their bicycles for scooters, and their scooters for cars. But consumption has lagged behind overall economic expansion. While they were buying at home, their governments were even more furiously spending swelling trade surpluses on what Paul Krugman, the Nobel economist, calls “sterile claims” on the US Treasury. China's household consumption, for example, has fallen to a lowly 35 per cent of gross domestic product, against 50 per cent in the 1980s.

Inter-regional trade has also risen sharply, creating a false impression that Asia has somehow broken free of dependence on western consumers. But as much as 60 per cent of inter-regional trade is in components, part of a sophisticated regional supply chain whose final demand has nevertheless remained primarily American and European.

As a forthcoming article by Brian Klein and Kenneth Cukier in the journal Foreign Affairs points out, Asia's export-dependent economies – with the important exception of China – have fared even worse than the western economies where the lightning of the financial crisis struck. Taiwan's exports shrank in the last quarter of 2008 by 42 per cent, while production dropped at a faster rate than the US experienced during the Great Depression. Similarly sharp contractions have happened all over Asia. For economies supposedly more resilient to falls in external demand, these have been savage declines indeed.

As Mr Klein and Mr Cukier write of the sputtering export-led model: “What brought the region so far in the 20th century may not take it much further in the 21st.”

As long ago as 1985, when Washington and Tokyo were at loggerheads over what were, even then, considered Japan's unsustainable trade surpluses, Japan commissioned the Maekawa report to come up with ideas for breaking export dependence. Nearly 25 years later, the job remains undone.

As Clyde Prestowitz, a trade negotiator in Ronald Reagan's administration, says: “I was in the room in 1984 when Japanese prime minister [Yasuhiro] Nakasone promised that Japan would become an importing superpower. It hasn't happened.” His explanation is that economic structures are resistant to change. “Export-led economies are organised to export. All the incentives are to save, invest, produce and export. All the politics are organised around that system.”

China, an economy in an earlier stage of development, has a better shot at transformation. But in China, too, national policies are more stuck in their ways than meets the eye.

It is now nearly universally accepted, for example, that one way to get Chinese to spend more is to improve the social safety net to encourage people to run down precautionary savings. Doubtless there is some truth in this. Yet, even if it could be achieved quickly, effects on spending would not be dramatic. The truth is Chinese household savings are not particularly high – lower, say, than in India. The big Chinese savers are the state and state-led corporations.

“It's not clear to me that Chinese consumers have lots of idle cash lying around,” says Yasheng Huang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr Huang argues that the real cause of China's low consumption is stagnating incomes, particularly among the 700m rural inhabitants. He blames China's political-economic structure which, he says, since the 1990s has stifled lending to rural enterprises and prioritised spending on the cities. Poor Chinese – and that means most of them – simply have not shared fully in economic growth. Interestingly, the same has happened in Japan, where flexible labour practices have exerted a downward pressure on wages. “It's an income problem and an income-distribution problem,” says Mr Huang.

Such structural difficulties do not mean China and others cannot establish new growth models less dependent on plastic-fuelled American consumers. If Mr Huang is right, much could be achieved in China simply by incentivising lending to the countryside or legalising underground rural banks.

Some of the adjustment will happen automatically. As exports fall, domestic consumption becomes a higher proportion of GDP whether you like it or not. Stimulus packages are already having an effect. The Japanese are buying fuel-efficient cars; the Chinese household electronics. But the trick will be to make domestic consumption – whether of goods or services – a permanent engine of growth.

人们大谈特谈亚洲新兴中产阶层，以及发展基于国内消费的新模式。迄今为止，也仅止于清谈。明摆着的事实是，纵使亚洲新兴城市那些零售商场令人眼花缭乱，该地区对外国需求的依赖却有增无减。

10年前，当亚洲处于自身造成的危机之中时，出口占亚洲产出的37%。那次危机暴露了亚洲对外资流动的过度依赖，为此，亚洲各国增加了制造品的生产。10年后，出口在亚洲产出中占到47%。

亚洲对外部需求的依赖加大，这点一直被掩盖。在许多国家，特别是中国，消费显著增加；人们把自行车换成了摩托车，又把摩托车换成了汽车。但消费一直落后于整体经济扩张的脚步。尽管人们在国内消费，但政府却更加大手大脚地把日益扩大的贸易顺差，花在诺贝尔经济学奖得主保罗•克鲁格曼(Paul Krugman)所称的对美国国债的“无利可图的债权”方面。例如，家庭消费占中国国内生产总值(GDP)的比例已降至35%的低位，而上世纪80年代为50%。

地区内贸易也大幅增长，这造成了一种假象，即亚洲已设法摆脱了对西方消费者的依赖。但大约60%的地区内贸易为零部件贸易，这是一个复杂的地区性供应链的一部分，这一链条的最终需求主要仍在美国和欧洲。

正如布赖恩•克莱恩(Brian Klein)和肯尼思•库克尔(Kenneth Cukier)即将发表在《外交》杂志(Foreign Affairs)上的一篇文章所指出的那样，比起本次金融危机的发源地西方经济体，亚洲出口依赖型经济体——中国除外，这很重要——的形势更加糟糕。2008年第四季度，台湾出口下滑42%，生产下滑速度快于“大萧条”时期的美国。整个亚洲地区都出现了类似的大幅收缩。对于那些被认为更有能力应付外部需求下滑的经济体而言，这样的降幅堪称剧烈。

写到“噼啪作响”的出口拉动型经济模式时，克赖恩和库克尔指出：“20世纪推动该地区发展到目前这一地步的因素，在21世纪可能不会继续推动该地区发展。”

早在1985年，当美日两国围绕当时就被视为不可持续的日本贸易顺差发生争执时，日本政府委托前川报告(Maekawa)，为摆脱出口依赖出谋划策。近25年后，这一工作仍未完成。

在罗纳德•里根(Ronald Reagan)时期担任美国贸易谈判代表的克莱德•佩雷斯托维茨(Clyde Prestowitz)表示：“1984年日本首相中曾根康弘(Yasuhiro] Nakasone)承诺，日本将成为超级进口大国。他说这话时我在场。这没有成为现实。”佩雷斯托维茨的解释是，经济结构对变革具有阻力。“出口拉动型经济体的结构是为了出口。所有激励都是为了储蓄、投资、生产和出口。所有的政治结构都围绕这一体系。”

作为一个处于较初期发展阶段的经济体，中国更有可能实现转型。但在中国，国内政策也比实际看到的更难以推行。

例如，人们现在几乎公认的一点是，中国增加消费的一种方法是完善社保体系，以此鼓励人们减少预防性储蓄。无疑，其中存在着一些道理。然而，即便这可以迅速实现，其对消费的影响也不会很大。事实是，中国家庭储蓄并非特别高，例如，比印度要低。中国储蓄大户是政府及其主导的企业。

麻省理工大学(MIT)教授黄亚声表示：“在我看来，并不能确定中国消费者拥有大量闲散资金。”

黄亚声指出，中国消费低企的真正原因，在于收入停滞不前，尤其是7亿农民的收入。他认为，症结在于中国的政治经济结构，自20世纪90年代以来，这种结构窒息了对乡镇企业的贷款，并将支出优先投向城市。在中国，穷人——这意味着多数人——没有充分分享经济增长带来的好处。有趣的是，日本也有过类似的情形，在日本，灵活的劳工惯例对薪资构成了下行压力。黄亚声表示：“这是一个收入问题，收入分配的问题。”

结构性困境并不意味着，中国等国无法确立新的增长模式，降低对受信用卡消费模式推动的美国消费者的依赖。如果黄亚声的观点正确，那么在中国，仅仅通过鼓励对农村放贷或将地下农村银行合法化，就能在很大程度上实现这一目标。

部分调整将自动完成。由于出口下滑，国内消费占GDP的比例将上升，不管你喜欢与否。刺激计划也已经在发挥作用。日本人在购买节能汽车；中国则在消费家用电器。但关键在于让国内消费——不管是产品还是服务——成为永久性的增长引擎。

译者/梁艳裳