兰德公司对中国的评价(中英文)

沉思：美国兰德公司对中国人的评价

2008-06-30 18:49

Statement of William H. Overholt1

Asia Policy Chair

Director, Center for Asia Pacific Policy

The RAND Corporation

Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission

May 19, 2005

Summary

China has transformed itself from the world’s greatest opponent of

globalization, and

greatest

disrupter

of

the

global

institutions

we

created,

into

a

committed

member of those

institutions and advocate of globalization. It is now a far more open

economy than Japan

and

it

is

globalizing

its

institutions

to

a

degree

not

seen

in

a

big

country

since Meiji

Japan. Adoption of the rule of law, of commitment to competition, of

widespread use of

English,

of

foreign

education,

and

of

many

foreign

laws

and

institutions

are not just

updating Chinese institutions but transforming Chinese civilization.

All

of

China’s

economic

successes

are

associated

with

liberalization

and

globalization,

and each aspect of globalization has brought China further successes.

Never in world

history have so many workers improved their standards of living so

rapidly. Thus

popular

support

for

globalization

is

greater

than

in

Japan,

where

postwar

recovery

occurred in a highly managed economy, or with the former Soviet Union,

where shock

therapy

traumatized

society.

In

consequence,

China

has

effectively

become

an ally of

U.S.

and

Southeast

Asian

promotion

of

freer

trade

and

investment

than

is

acceptable to

Japan, India and Brazil.

____________

The

opinions

and

conclusions

expressed

in

this

testim

ony

are

the

author’s

alone

and

should

not

be

interpreted

as

representing

those

of

RAND

or

any

of

the

sponsors of its

research.

This

product

is

part

of

the

RAND

Corporation

testimony

series.

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testimonies record testimony presented by RAND associates to federal,

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Corporation

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providing objective analysis and effective solutions that address the

challenges facing the

public

and

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around

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world.

RAND’s

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reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

Nonetheless, rapid Chinese globalization has required stressful

adjustments. State

enterprise employment has declined by 44 million. China has lost 25

million

manufacturing

jobs.

125

car

companies

are

expected

to

consolidate

rapidly

into 3 to 6.

China’s globalization successes are profoundly influencing its

neighbors. India has

learned

from

China

the

advantages

of

a

more

open

economy.

Asians

schooled

in

antipathy to foreign investment and Latin Americans with protectionist

traditions are

going to have to be more open to foreign investment and less dependent

on loans in order

to compete with China. This will transform third world strategies of

development and

create broader global opportunities for our companies.

Contrary to early fears, China’s rise has stimulated neighbors’ trade

and foreign

investment rather than depriving them. Indeed C

hina’s recent growth

spurt revived

Japan’s economy and saved key neighbors from recession, possibly

averting a dangerous

global downturn.

Chinese growth has brought American companies new markets. The flow of

profits from

China

to

the

U.S.

is

as

disproportionate

as

the

flow

of

goods.

Inexpensive

products have

substantially improved the living standards of poorer Americans.

Inexpensive Chinese

goods and Chinese financing of our deficit have kept U.S. inflation and

interest rates

down and prolonged our economic booms. At the same time, it has caused

trade deficits

and social adjustments. Chinese misappropriation of intellectual

property creates losses

for many of our companies. A manic construction and transportation boom

has raised

global

raw

materials

prices,

to

the

great

benefit

of

producers

and

a

great

cost to

consumers.

China’s success is one of the most important developments of modern

history, but

projecting

from

current

growth

to

Chinese

global

dominance

or

threats

to

our way of life

is

just

wrong.

Unlike

the

old

Soviet

Union,

reformist

China

does

not

seek

to alter any

other country’s way of life. Its economy faces world history’s most

severe combination

of banking, urbanization and employment challenges, and by 2020 a

demographic

squeeze that will have few workers supporting many dependents. The best

outcome for

us would be a China that is eventually like Japan, prosperous, winning

in some sectors,

losing in others. Signs that China is making rapid progress in that

direction should be

welcomed, not feared.

China and Globalization

Before reform, China was the world’s most important opponent of

globalization. It had

an

autarkic

economy.

It

opposed

the

global

economic

order.

It

opposed

the

global

political

order

and

the

major

global

institutions

such

as

the

IMF

and

the

World Bank. It

believed that global disorder was a good thing, and under Mao Zedong it

actively

promoted disorder throughout the world, including promotion of

insurgencies in most of

China’s neighbors, in

much of Africa

and Latin

America, and

even in our

universities.

Accompanying foreign policy disaffection was domestic cultural despair

on a scale the

world has seldom witnessed. In the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976,

China’s students

and others, under the guidance of Mao Zedong’s peasant chili

asm,

humiliated a majority

of senior government and party leaders, attacked the country’s major

educational, social

and

political

institutions,

destroyed

much

of

China’s

cultural

heritage,

and in general

tried to smash the country’s establishment.

For two centuries Chinese had tried a range of ways

–

socialism,

capitalism, empire,

republic, warlords, religious fundamentalism, and others. All failed.

Alienation was so

severe that, along with students, much of the country accepted that the

world economic

and political order, and the Chinese economic and political order, were

so stacked against

them

that

any

path

to

success

had

to

start

with

destruction

of

the

existing

order.

The Cultural Revolution was actually just one small episode in the

problems that Chinese

impoverishment and political division created for the world and

specifically for us. Had

China been prosperous and unified throughout the twentieth century, we

would have had

European War II rather than World War II and World War I would have been

quite

different. China would have been able to deter or defeat Japanese

aggression. The cost

of

those

conflicts

to

the

U.S.

would

have

been

radically

smaller

because

Pearl Harbor and

much else would not have happened. We and the world, not to speak of a

billion Chinese

citizens, have paid a horrible price, over more than a century, for

China’s weakness. The

world needs a healthy China.

Because of China’s successful globalization we no longer have such

problems. China is

no longer a vacuum that sucks the world’s

great powers into gigantic

conflicts. China no

longer sponsors insurgencies in Southeast Asia and Africa and Latin

America. China no

longer seeks to undermine the global financial institutions. We obtain

benefits from a

China that supports stable capitalist democracy in Thailand and the

Philippines; that joins

the IMF, World Bank, and WTO; and that counsels its neighbors about the

benefits of

political stability, free trade, and free investment.

From

the

beginning

of

the

Cold

War,

it

has

been

the

central

tenet

of

U.S.

foreign policy

that, if we could engage as much of the world as possible in successful

economic growth,

through domestic reform and what came later to be called globalization,

we could

stabilize Europe and Asia, win the Cold War, and create a stable global

order. Our

military protected this process, but from the Marshall Plan to our aid

missions in Asia

and Africa, the core long-run strategy

of our country

has been to engage

the world and

stabilize it by enmeshing other countries in a web of institutions and

successful economic

practices that constitute the kind of world we want.

This strategy has proved to be one of the most successful geopolitical

strategies in human

history, so much so that it has entangled our former enemies as well as

our allies in the

web we wove. Throughout, it has stimulated many controversies, and

occasional waves

of fear in this country. Key industries, including especially textiles

and shoes, have

successively opposed liberal trade with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,

Southeast Asia,

China and Latin America. We had a wave of panic over whether Japan was

going to take

over

all

manufacturing

and

buy

all

our

most

important

assets; after

all,

if they could

triumph in steel, cars, and televisions, and buy Rockefeller Center,

was

n’t everything in

our economy at risk? Elsewhere, weren’t we sponsoring horrible

dictatorships by

encouraging the development of Taiwan and South Korea? Each time, our

fears have

proved

excessive,

and

each

time

our

strategy

triumphed.

The

results

have

been good for

our

security,

good

for

our

prosperity,

good

for

political

liberalization

overseas, and good

for the people of

our trading

partners.

Our concerns about

China are the

same.

China’s globalization

What we never expected from our strategy was that it would entice our former

adversaries, including China, into our web of economic institutions and our commitment

to geopolitical stability.

Although joining late, China has joined the globalized system much more enthusiastically

than Japan. China’s economy is much more open than Japan. China’s trade in 2004 was

equal to 70% of its GDP

, Japan’s to 24%. China received $$60.6 billion of foreign direct

investment in 2004, while Japan, with an economy several times larger and in a phase of

restructuring that should have attracted disproportionate foreign investment, received

only $$20.1 billion.

China’s globalization is not confined to opening the economy but more importantly to

globalization of institutions. Here the development strategy of contemporary China bears

a striking resemblance to that of early Meiji (mid-nineteenth century) Japan, when the

Japanese government was sending missions around the world to choose for emulation the

best foreign navy (Britain), the best foreign education system (Germany), and so forth.

In the intervening century and a half, Japanese practice has become more inward-looking,

while China has evolved from Qing defensiveness and Maoist peasant xenophobia to an

assimilative cosmopolitanism.

Today China is the country that sends missions throughout the world seeking best

practice. It adapts not just foreign technology and foreign corporate management

techniques but also a wide variety of foreign institutions and practices: international

accounting standards; British, U.S. and Hong Kong securities laws; French military

acquisition systems; a central bank structure modeled on the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank;

Taiwan-style regulations for foreign portfolio investment; an economic development

strategy adapted from South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan; and many others. Among the

most important of these changes are the decision to adopt the Western concept of rule of

law; adoption of competition as a centrally important economic practice; and adoption of

English language as virtually a second language for the educated Chinese population.

Today I can lecture in Peking University and interview senior officials in Beijing and

Shanghai without a translator. Perhaps most importantly, China has sent its elite youth

abroad for education in an exercise of internationalism comparable to the Romans turning

over their children to the Greeks.

Of course, such changes occur gradually; you can’t instantly introduce Western

accounting or Western law in a country that starts with no professional accountants or

lawyers. But the changes are startlingly fast compared with what other countries do.

More importantly, these are not technical adaptations in the manner of the old dynastic

efforts to pursue “Western technology, Chinese culture.” These are transformative

processes that in cases like rule of law and promotion of competition repudiate core

aspects of traditional Chinese civilization that go back for millennia.

China is also experiencing globalization of tastes. The exposure of the Chinese

population to foreign brands has been incorporating them into global culture. To take

one example, I spent many months studying the Chinese car industry. One of the

questions we were asked was whether China might develop indigenous car models in a

closed-off market like that of South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s. What we discovered

was that the Chinese people have been so much more exposed to global culture than

South Koreans of a generation ago that no car could succeed in China unless it

incorporated global designs and prestigious foreign technologies. Ten to thirty years ago,

when South Korea was at a phase of car industry development more comparable to China

today, one virtually never saw a European or American car on the road, and they are still

very rare today. But in China the roads are packed with Volkswagens and Buicks.

China has come to believe in globalization more than most third world countries and

many first world countries. China’s successes have all coincided with “reform and

opening,” that is, with globalization. In contrast, Japan’s and South Korea’s successes

occurred in an era when, although they were globalizing, they employed far stricter

controls on trade, foreign investment, and domestic economic activity than today’s

China.

Globalization has required extremely painful adjustments by China. Employment in the

state enterprises has declined from 110 million at the end of 1995 to 66 million in March

2005. Those who think there has been a simple transfer of U.S. manufacturing jobs to

China will be surprised to know that manufacturing jobs in China have declined from

over 54 million in 1994 to under 30 million today. Even these striking numbers

understate the adjustments China has had to accept due to greater competition and lately

from WTO membership. For instance, while employment in the car industry has

remained relatively constant, the number of car manufacturers is expected to decline from

125 at the peak to somewhere between three and six. Meanwhile, foreign joint ventures

have come to dominate much of the market.

It is hard to overstate the social adjustment Chinese are experiencing. But because China

has been willing to accept such adjustments, no large country in human history has ever

experienced such rapid improvements in living standards and working conditions. When

reform began, workers in Shanghai all wore the same clothes, looked tired and listless,

and seldom owned basic appliances like televisions or even watches. In the countryside

malnutrition was widespread. Today Shanghai workers wear colorful clothes and look

confident and energetic. Today the average Chinese family owns slightly more than one

television. Malnutrition has vanished. As a result, Chinese overwhelmingly support

further globalization.

China’s globalization and other countries

China’s globali

zation has of course strongly influenced other countries too. The most

important impact has been on India’s economic policy and performance. Since

independence India’s economy had been hobbled by extremely protectionist trade

policies, an antagonistic stance toward foreign direct investment, and a remarkable

network of domestic socialist economic controls called the license raj, combined with

strong foreign economic and political ties to the old Soviet Union. A 1991 foreign

exchange squeeze and neighboring

China’s success shocked India and also showed that

abandoning the old hostility to globalization could lead to prosperity. While India started

later than China and moved more slowly, India’s economic growth rates have doubled.

The number of people in absolute poverty has declined sharply. Exports have boomed

and foreign exchange reserves are ample for the first time in modern history. Visit India

today, as I did last month, and you find the kind of hope and confidence and energy that

once seemed confined to East Asia.

As happened earlier with China, India’s newfound economic dynamism has shifted the

balance of leaders’ priorities from conflictful geopolitical goals to mutual economic

interests. India’s relations with its neighbors, sometimes including even P

akistan, and

most notably with both China and ourselves, are much better than previously. Indeed,

Indian- Chinese relations are better than at any time since the conflicts of the 1960s, and

India’s business community has shifted from terror about competitio

n with China to

confidence in India’s competitive advantages and even some celebration of India’s recent

trade surplus with China.

China’s influence on India’s economic policies is just one example of a much wider

phenomenon that is probably just beginning. Until recently, most of the third world plus

Japan has taken a relatively hostile attitude toward foreign direct investment. Difficult

licensing requirements, high taxes, unfair judicial treatment and an negative opinion

climate have faced direct investors from Japan and South Korea to the Philippines and

Thailand to India, not to mention most of Latin America. Instead of accepting foreign

ownership, countries typically relied on foreign loans (South Korea, Southeast Asia,

Latin America) or domestic loans (Japan), frequently creating an excessive burden of

debt. Thailand imposed very high taxes and then reduced them for selected foreign

investors; Indian groups attacked Kentucky Fried Chicken with distorted hygiene

allegations. Now such tactics are waning.

The success of China at balancing debt with equity, building upon the previous successes

of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, is gradually changing the way much of the world

manages economic development. This Chinese influence is going to be transformative,

particularly in Asia. The old pattern has been to avoid dependence on foreign investment

by taking domestic and foreign bank loans. Governments then controlled the

development of industry by channeling the bank loans. This made companies and

countries overly dependent on banks, leading to periodic financial crises. It gave

governments too much control over industries, encouraging mismanagement and

corruption. It gave unfair advantages to large, politically favored companies over smaller

companies and foreign companies. Importantly for us, it limited the opportunities for our

own companies. Now competition with China will force most companies to open

themselves to foreign investment. American companies will benefit not just in China but

throughout the world.

At the beginning of this decade, there were widespread fears that China’s success would

suck the trade and investment away from its Asian neighbors, impoverishing them. In

the event, the opposite has happened. Wherever rules have been changed to welcome

foreign direct investment, as in India, South Korea, and Japan, such investment has