【英语生活】制造业不再西水东流？

My uncle's Austin Maxi was a tough old beast. It was the sort of car that never gave up. It carried my cousins and their parents all the way from Scotland to Spain and back again on ambitious summer holidays, but could also display a useful turn of speed, outgunning my dad's Renault 12 with some ease.

It is strange, our nostalgia for these vanished car marques. After all, it is not as though some of these older models were really any good, at least, not compared with today's far more comfortable and reliable cars that are so much easier to drive.

Luckily for me – and for my fellow road users – I have never had to double declutch in my life. But I do remember those cold mornings when the jump-leads had to be applied and the choke was pulled out all the way, or those long summer drives when bare legs got scorched by boiling hot vinyl seats. The good old days left considerable room for improvement.

Petrol heads of a certain vintage will have been able to indulge all their nostalgic feelings in the past few days after reading the long and largely affectionate obituaries of Lord (Donald) Stokes, the former chairman of the British Leyland Motor Corporation, who died last week.

Stokes was the man with the impossible job. He was charged, between 1967 and 1975, with modernising, and saving, the once world-beating British car industry. Overmanned, with outdated practices and abysmal industrial relations, the business was probably doomed. Triumph and Jaguar and Rover and Morris may have been names that delighted car enthusiasts round the world but, increasingly, customers preferred Volkswagens and BMWs and Fiats and Renaults. And this before the arrival of high-quality cars from Japan.

The collapse of British-owned car manufacturing is sometimes seen not only as a symbol of post-imperial decline but also as a clear warning that large-scale manufacturing is a game in which mature western economies will find it ever harder to compete. Look at Detroit. Some argue that the Americans are getting ready to film their own sequel to the British story, only this time in colour and with even more blood-curdling numbers.

As children we laughed about toys that had been “made in Hong Kong”. Our children play almost exclusively with toys that have been “made in China”. (Adults, meanwhile, watch programmes on Chinese-made TVs, or DVDs on Chinese-made players.) On cue – more nostalgia coming up – the UK employers organisation, the CBI, celebrated the 50th anniversary of its industrial trends survey last week. Its latest prognostication? Recession, with tens of thousands of British manufacturing jobs set to go. The conclusion for manufacturers is clear. All aboard the fastest boat you can find to China.

But wait. Research led by Arnoud De Meyer, director of the UK's Judge business school in Cambridge, points to a far more interesting future for manufacturers in the developed world.

In 1995, together with colleagues Ann Vereecke and Roland Van Dierdonck, Prof De Meyer looked at eight manufacturers who between them ran 59 plants in Europe. Returning to these companies 10 years later, the professors found they now ran 82 plants. True, most of the new sites were located in east Asia and India, and 18 European sites had been closed. But far from abandoning the old continent, these businesses (which included some familiar names such as Samsonite and Tupperware) were staying put.

The factories that were, in Prof De Meyer's terms, “knowledge-producing” – the ones that operated by drawing on a combination of valuable “codified and tacit” knowledge – had a future. It was those that were mere “receiver” factories – more passive recipients of material, capital and labour – that were replaced by lower cost options in south-east Asia. And even here, the main cause of relocation was the need to serve new markets.

To survive in older established markets factories need to play a vigorous part in their parent company's overall business plan, the professors found. Successful plants “encourage visits from other plants and are actively involved in spreading new knowledge around their network”, Prof De Meyer says.

Labour costs are rising fast in China and India and it is no longer always clear that the great lurch east makes financial sense. Even if oil prices return to less scary levels, the cost of transportation and the delays created by extended supply chains all have to be taken into account.

Investing in China will often be a much less straightforward task for a western multinational than committing to, say, France or Germany. No need to tell the Carlyle Group that: the private equity firm's $375m battle to control the Xugong Group Construction Machinery group was an energy-sapping, three-year saga that ended in failure last week.

British-owned car manufacturing may be a thing of the past. But cars made in Britain, efficiently and profitably, by Nissan, Toyota and Honda, continue to sell well. And the Tata group's $2.3bn purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover this year confirmed that some of the smartest people in business have not yet given up on the great British assembly line worker.

Anyone still got one of those “I'm backing Britain” posters from 40 years ago?

我叔叔的Austin Maxi是一只顽强的老怪兽。它是那种永不放言弃的汽车。暑假里，它载着我叔叔一家人，从苏格兰一路玩到西班牙，再折返回来。它还展现出相当快的行速，能够轻松胜过我爸的雷诺12。很奇怪，我们对这些旧时的车型向往不已。毕竟，有些老车型并非真的有多好，至少无法与现代汽车相比。如今的汽车要舒服得多，更加安全可靠，也更易于驾驶。

谢天谢地，我还有我的同辈们永远用不着“踩两脚离合”的技术。但我确实记得，以前，在寒冷的早晨必须使用跨接线，阻风门要全程拔开；还有，夏天长途驾车时，光着的腿被滚烫的乙烯基座椅烤得火热。美好的旧时光留下相当大的改善空间。

近日，充满感情的有关唐纳德•斯托克斯勋爵(Lord Donald Stokes)去世的长篇讣闻，可能会让昔日的车迷们陷入怀旧情怀。斯托克斯勋爵是英国利兰汽车公司(British Leyland Motor Corporation)前董事长。

斯托克斯身负不可能完成的任务。1967至1975年间，他受命改造和拯救一度称霸全球的英国汽车制造业。冗员、作风过时以及恶劣的劳资关系，或许注定了这个行业行将没落。凯旋(Triumph)、捷豹(Jaguar)、陆虎(Rover)和莫里斯(Morris)等品牌曾经受到全球车迷的喜爱，但消费者日渐青睐大众(Volkswagen)、宝马(BMW)、菲亚特(Fiat)和雷诺(Renault)。在这之后，则是日本的高品质汽车受到欢迎。

英国汽车制造业的没落，不仅时常被看作后帝国衰落时代的象征，也是一个清晰的警告信号，说明在广泛的制造业，成熟西方经济体将发现竞争比以往更加激烈。看看底特律。一些人认为，美国人即将重蹈英国的覆辙，只是这次声势浩大，相关数字也更加惊人。

孩提时，我们嘲笑“香港制造”的玩具。如今，我们的孩子玩的几乎都是“中国制造”的玩具。（与此同时，成年人用中国制造的电视机收看电视节目，用中国制造的播放器观看DVD。）以下说的更让人怀旧。上周，英国企业组成的英国工业联合会(CBI)庆祝其工业趋势调查的50周年纪念日。它最新的预言是什么？衰退，英国制造业工作将减少成千上万个。对制造商而言，结论是显而易见的。大家都找最快的船赶往中国。

但等等。剑桥大学(Cambridge)Judge商学院(Judge Business School)院长阿尔努•德•梅耶尔(Arnoud de Meyer)带头进行的研究指出，发达国家制造商的前景实际上要有意思得多。

1995年，德•梅耶尔教授与同事安•富雷卡(Ann Vereecke)和罗兰•范迪耶多克(Roland Van Dierdonck)合作，对8家在欧洲经营着59家工厂的制造企业进行观察。10年后回头来看，教授们发现这些公司现在经营着82家工厂。的确，新厂多数设在东亚和印度，而且有18家欧洲工厂已经关闭。但这些企业——包括新秀丽(Samsonite)和特百惠(Tupperware)等大家熟悉的名字——非但没有放弃旧大陆，反而是坚守阵地。

以德•梅耶尔教授的话来说，善于总结知识的工厂，即能够吸收有价值的“显性知识和隐性知识”的工厂是有前途的。那些只是“接受者”的工厂——材料、资金和劳动力等的被动接受者——则被东南亚的低成本工厂所取代。而且，迁厂的主要原因也是服务于新市场的需要。

教授们发现，要在比较成熟的市场获得生存，工厂在母公司的总体业务计划中必须充当一个活跃的角色。德•梅耶尔教授表示，成功的工厂“鼓励其他工厂来访，积极参与新知识在内部网络中的传播”。

中国和印度的劳动力成本正在快速上升，向东方一边倒的做法不再总是具有明显的财务意义。即使油价回落到不那么让人惊慌的水平，也需要考虑运输成本以及供应链延长所致的拖延。

对西方跨国公司来说，投资中国往往不如投资法国和德国等地来得简单直接。凯雷集团(Carlyle Group)有切身感触：这家私人股本公司欲以3.75亿美元控股徐工机械(Xugong Group Construction Machinery)，结果成了一场徒耗精力、历时三年而终告失败的征战。

英国自己的汽车制造业或许已经成为过去。但日产(Nissan)、丰田(Toyota)和本田(Honda)等公司在英国生产的汽车照旧卖得很好，既省油又能赚钱。塔塔集团(Tata)今年出资23亿美元收购捷豹和陆虎，证实业内一些最精明的人士仍未放弃英国组装线上的工人。

有人记得40年前那些“我支持英国”(I'm backing Britain)的海报吗？

译者/岱嵩