【英语中国】西方也要为“中国制造”负责

Boy, this US presidential campaign is really hotting up. Only the other day I heard one of the leading contenders issue this stark warning to America's great new economic rival.The citizens of that country, he said, had "better be prepared to sit on the docks of Shanghai in your little cars while you stare at your own little television sets and eat your mandarin oranges, because we've had all we're going to take!"

Oh all right - I admit it. The quote is not new. In fact the remarks date back to 1980, to another presidential campaign, and were spoken by John Connally, the Texan who was famously wounded as he sat in front of John F. Kennedy in the presidential limousine in Dallas on November 22 1963.

The port Connally referred to back then was Yokohama and the little cars he mentioned were made by Datsun and Toyota. But - and this is my point - the sentiment sounds disturbingly familiar today. The recent wave of scandals and product recalls involving Chinese manufactured goods has provoked a new surge of foreigner bashing in the US, only this time it is the Chinese and not the Japanese who are copping it.

Even the usually measured Hillary Clinton was moved to declare while out on the stump recently: "I do not want to eat bad food from China or have my children having toys that are going to get them sick. So let's be tough on China going forward." (Clearly, the pressures of working first at McKinsey and now at a hedge fund have led Chelsea Clinton to seek comfort with her Barbie and Ken dolls.)

OK - so let's all blame the Chinese for the dodgy pet food, the toxic toys, the poisonous toothpaste and the chemical-drenched clothes. Except that this would be to misunderstand how this state of affairs has come about. Mary Teagarden, a professor at the Thunderbird school of global management in Phoenix, Arizona, has been studying Chinese businesses for three decades. In her opinion the sloppiness and corner-cutting now being revealed is down to management failures much nearer the top of the supply chain.

"You have a situation where there is often no incoming inspection of raw materials, and no outgoing inspection of finished goods. This is about business people displaying poor business practice," she says. Of course, low-cost sources of production are attractive. But that price arbitrage has to be handled carefully.

"Wal-Mart squeezes Mattel [the toy maker], Mattel squeezes its supplier, that supplier squeezes its supplier, and at the end of the chain you have a remote business far out in the countryside that takes a different approach. They don't put lead in paint because they are wicked, it's just what works for them. China is so large, and industrialisation has been so rapid, that maintaining any control over multiple sites is extremely difficult," she says.

Mattel has now admitted that some of its trusted Chinese partners, facing rapidly rising costs at home, had used cheaper paint suppliers that were not on the company's approved list.

It is this kind of scenario that has led other business observers to adopt a more extreme view than that offered by Prof Teagarden. Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland, said recently: "If you put it in your mouth or into the hands of a child, don't buy it from China." But this sort of attitude (and rhetoric) provides a cop-out to western managers who have been asleep on the job. This is as much about us as it is about them.

Business leaders have often evoked a sense of "the other", a great rival or threat, to focus minds and encourage people to work harder. Politicians, first during the cold war and now in the "war on terror", have tried this trick too.

Older readers will remember how, in the wake of the Soviets' Sputnik triumph, many in the west started to believe that they were doomed to be overtaken, economically and militarily, by the all-conquering Russians. Then came the fiendish Japanese with their marvellous photocopiers and cameras and cars. Now it's China.

But to adapt the familiar slogan: it's the management, stupid. Our management, which urgently needs to get a better grip on the supply chain. A more sophisticated understanding of the realities of doing business in the global age has to be developed too. This means forming effective partnerships with low-cost countries, and not seeing every new entrant as a primitive, blood-curdling threat.

Robert Reich, the former US labour secretary, described what sort of mindset the new era would demand back in 1992, before he left academia to serve in the Clinton White House. In an article for the New York Times in February that year, headlined "Is Japan Out To Get Us?", he wrote this: "The central question for America in the post-Soviet world - a diverse America, whose economy and culture are rapidly fusing with the economies and cultures of the rest of the globe - is whether it is possible to rediscover our identity . . . without creating a new enemy."

Business leaders will have to raise their game if they want to pass the Robert Reich test.

好家伙，这次美国总统大选真的开始升温了。就在那天，我听到一位主要候选人向美国新的经济大对头发出了这个严重警告。他说道，那个国家的公民“要准备好，坐在上海的码头上，呆在你们的小车里，盯着你们自己的小电视，吃着你们的桔子，因为我们受够了。”

好的好的，我承认就是。这句话并不新鲜。事实上，这番言论发表于上世纪80年代的另一次总统大选，出自约翰•康纳利(John Connally)之口，就是那个1963年11月22日在达拉斯，坐在约翰•肯尼迪(John F.Kennedy)总统专车前座上受伤，并以此闻名的德克萨斯人。

康纳利当时所说的那个港口是横滨，他提到的那些小车是达特桑(Datsun)和丰田(Toyota)。但我想说的是，当今人们的情绪似乎令人不安地与此相似。近期一系列和中国产品相关的丑闻和产品召回引发了美国新一波的批外风潮，只不过这一次挨批的是中国人，而不是日本人。

就连通常颇有分寸的希拉里•克林顿(Hillary Clinton)也受到了感染，她最近在演说中表示：“我不想吃来自中国的劣质食品，也不想给孩子买会让他们生病的玩具。所以，以后我们要对中国硬气点儿。”（很明显，最初在麦肯锡(McKinsey)以及现在在对冲基金就职给切尔西•克林顿(Chelsea Clinton)带来了压力，促使她向芭比(Barbie)娃娃和肯娃娃(Ken)寻求安慰。）

好，那就让我们都来指责中国人，指责那些有问题的宠物口粮、有害的玩具、有毒的牙膏和浸透着化学品的衣物。只不过，这将是对目前状况成因的误解。美国亚利桑那州凤凰城雷鸟国际管理学院(Thunderbird)的玛丽•蒂加登(Mary Teagarden)教授已研究中国企业长达30载。在她看来，不管是粗枝大叶还是投机取巧，目前发现的这些问题，责任在于更接近供应链顶端的管理层的失职。

她表示：“目前的情况是，原料输入和成品输出通常都不受检查。这是一个经营者显示出低下经营水平的问题。”当然，低成本的生产基地是好事，但价格套利需要小心运作。

蒂加登表示：“沃尔玛(Wal-Mart)挤压玩具商美泰(Mattel)，美泰挤压自己的供货商，那个供货商再挤压自己的供货商，最后到链条的末端，是一家位于偏僻农村的遥远企业，使用的是另一种方法。他们将铅混入漆料，不是因为他们恶毒，而是因为那是一种可行的方式。中国如此之庞大，工业化进程如此之迅速，要想控制多个地方非常困难。”

美泰现在承认，它信任的一些中国合作伙伴面临本土成本的快速上升，使用了不在公司许可名单上的廉价漆料供货商。

正是这种情形让其他商业观察人士采纳了比蒂加登教授更极端的观点。美国马里兰大学(University of Maryland)商业教授彼得•莫里西(Peter Morici)最近说过：“如果要入口或是上孩子的手，就不要从中国买。”但此种态度（及说辞）为没有尽职的西方经理人提供了一个借口。这件事既事关他们，也事关我们。

商业领袖常常会挑起员工对巨大的对头或威胁的“他人”感，以集中他们的思想，激励他们更努力地工作。政客也曾使用这种伎俩，先是在冷战中，现在是“反恐战争”。

年长的读者会记得，在苏联成功发射了世界上第一颗人造地球卫星后，西方许多人开始认为，他们注定会在经济和军事上被所向无敌的苏联人超越。随后是恶魔般的日本人，他们拥有了不起的复印机、照相机和汽车。现在变成了中国。

但要改编一下那个熟悉的口号：这是个管理问题，笨蛋。我们的管理层急需更好地掌控供应链。同样需要发展的，是加深对在全球化时代做生意的现实情况的了解。这意味着与低成本国家建立有效的合伙关系，不要把每个新入者都视为原始的、令人毛骨悚然的威胁。

回到1992年，美国前任劳工部长罗伯特•莱克(Robert Reich)在离开学术界到克林顿政府供职之前，对新纪元所需要的思想进行了描述。那年2月，他为《纽约时报》撰写了一篇文章，题目是《日本将超过我们？》(Is Japan Out To Get Us?)。他在文中写道：“在后苏联时代的世界里，美国开始多元化，经济和文化迅速与全球其它地区相融合。在这种环境下，美国面临的中心问题是，是否有可能在不树立新敌人的情况下，重新确立我们的身份地位。”

如果想通过罗伯特•莱克的测试，商业领袖就必须要提高他们的水平。

译者/何黎

《FT商学院》