西方对中国经济的看法错了 [美国媒体]

What the West Gets Wrong About China's Economy

西方对中国经济的看法错了



Debt, Trade, and Corruption

债务，贸易，腐败

Few countries command as much attention as China. That is not surprising. Its remarkable economic rise is shaking the world’s geopolitical balance even as it raises questions about the universality of market-led capitalism and democratic norms. In turn, China has become a lightning rod for all manner of anxiety. The White House has blamed China for the United States’ huge trade deficits, for example, even though there is no direct causal relationship between such deficits and China’s surpluses. In fact, there are several things about China that U.S. analysts get wrong.

很少有国家能像中国那样获得如此多的关注。但这并不奇怪。其经济的飞速增长已经动摇了世界的地缘政治平衡，也激起了对市场导向的资本主义体制以及民主政治普适性的怀疑。相反，中国已经成为了各种焦虑情绪的避风港。白宫一直在谴责中国造成了美国的贸易赤字问题，尽管没有显着证据证明美国赤字问题与中国贸易盈余存在因果关系。实际上，美国分析师对中国问题的很多分析都是错的。

It isn’t hard to understand why. For the general public, there are difficulties in drawing appropriate conclusions about a country that is so big and regionally diverse in the distribution of its natural resources and commercial activities. And sentiments are almost always clouded by differences in ideology, values, and culture.

理解这个原因并不难。对于美国普罗大众来说，很难对一个如此庞大且自然资源和商业活动分布都很多样的国家作出合理的分析总结。普通人的情绪也往往被意识形态、 价值观、 文化的差异所蒙蔽。

For scholars, meanwhile, conflicting views stem from the lack of an agreed framework for analyzing China’s economy. Decades ago, in the heyday of the Soviet Union, universities taught courses on centrally planned or “transitional” economies as an academic discipline. With the demise of the former Soviet Union, this body of analysis faded away. Today, China is studied as a developing economy, yet it is not one. The close links between its financial, fiscal, trade, and social welfare systems make it a different animal entirely.

与此同时，对于学者专家来说矛盾的观点来自于缺乏分析中国经济的统一框架。十几年前的苏联全盛时期时，美国大学开了一门讲授“计划经济”或者“过渡经济”的学科课程。苏联解体后这种分析方法就被抛弃了。现在我们却依旧将中国视作一个发展中国家研究。中国金融部，财政部，贸易部以及社会福利体系间的紧密联系是中国成为了一个与美国完全不同的整体。

Given the lack of an appropriate framework for analyzing China, predictions of its future have varied wildly. Among the many popular beliefs are that China’s high debt levels will inevitably lead to financial crisis (yet its debt as a share of GDP places it around the middle of major economies); that corruption has negative consequences for China’s growth (yet deepening corruption has facilitated rather than impeded growth); that it is impossible for U.S. firms to compete with China because its wages are so low (yet China’s wages have increased fivefold since the mid-1990s); and that American companies invest a lot in China, which is a drain on jobs in the United States (yet less than two percent of America’s foreign investment over the past decade actually went to China).

在缺少分析中国的合适研究框架下，各种分析师对中国经济未来的预测大相径庭。主流经济学家相信中国过高的债务水平必可避免地会导致经济危机（尽管中国的债务总量占GDP的比重在主要经济体间只处于中游）；腐败对中国经济增长的负面影响（然而不断加深的腐败一直在促进而不是阻碍增长）；在中国那么福利成本那么低的基础上，美国公司不可能与此竞争（但是中国的劳工福利已经在90年代的基础上增长了5倍）；美国公司在华大规模投资吸走了美国的工作机会（事实是过去10年美国对外投资中只有不到2%去了中国）。

If the analysis is off, then it is likely that Western policy responses are as well.

如果对中国经济的分析失败了的话，那么西方对中国竞争的政策回应也很可能失败。

WHY CHINA’S DEBT IS DIFFERENT

为什么中国的债务问题是不同的

For many years, annual Pew and Gallup polls have reported that most Americans see China as the leading global economic power. Europeans, for the most part, share this view. Those in the rest of the world, however, correctly identify the United States as the world’s top economic power. Perception is important; politicians are greatly influenced by where they sit and the sentiments of their constituents.

多年来，皮尤以及盖洛普年度民意测验显示大多数美国人将中国视作全球经济的领导者。大多数欧洲人也抱有相同观点。但剩余国家依旧将美国视作世界顶尖的经济强国。对世界局势的感知很重要，但政客往往受到身份立场以及选民情绪的左右。

Why is there such a dichotomy between the views of developed and developing countries? The answer comes from the preoccupation of the United States and Europe with their huge trade deficits with China as a sign of economic weakness. Overall, the rest of the world generates trade surpluses with China, and many countries realize that economic power comes more from the strength of a nation’s economic institutions and the depth of its human capital than from trade alone.

为什么发达国家和发展中国家对中国的观点有如此大的分歧？答案在于美国和欧洲充分认识到自身与中国的贸易存在巨额赤字这一事实，以及事实背后自身经济的脆弱性。但其余国家在与中国的贸易中处于盈余地位，很多国家也认识到了经济实力来自于一国经济体制的有效性以及对于人力资源的开发利用深度而不只是贸易本身。

For the more ideologically inclined, China’s economic ascendancy threatens the tenets of Western political liberalism—grounded in free markets, democracy, and the sanctity of human rights. These concerns often surface as a debate about the roles of the state versus the market, or the priority to be accorded to individual liberties versus collective action. The relative positions of the United States and China have become caricatures, although they may have more in common than many realize in terms of the problems that need to be addressed.

在意识形态方面，中国经济崛起也威胁到了西方的政治自由主义原则——根植于自由贸易，民主制以及人权的神圣不可侵犯。这种担忧表面上看是对国家和市场在经济活动中扮演主导角色的辩论或者个人自由与集体主义谁先谁后的问题。美国和中国的相对关系像漫画一样充满讽刺意味，虽然他们有更多的共同点而不是需要解决的问题。

In the West, the debate about the market versus the state took on more urgency after the 2007-08 financial crisis, when major Western economies stumbled badly as China continued steadily apace. Critics of the Chinese model found China to blame for the West’s woes. They warned of its unbalanced growth (as measured by its extremely low share of personal consumption relative to the size of its economy and high outward investment), which would make it harder for the United States and Europe to recover. In the long run, the imbalance would even harm China itself. Thus, under U.S. President Barack Obama and now President Donald Trump, Washington has been urging Beijing to boost consumption if China wants to achieve high-income status—to escape the so-called middle-income trap.

在西方，07-08经济危机爆发后对市场和国家谁该在经济活动中占据主导地位的辩论越发频繁。那时主要西方经济体深陷危机无法自拔而中国经济稳步增长。中国模式的批评者将西方面临的危机归咎于中国。他们警告中国不平衡的增长（相对于其经济规模和高额对外投资而言，其个人消费所占的份额非常低），将使美国和欧洲国家更难以走出经济危机。长期来看，这种不平衡也会损害中国自身经济。因此，上任美国总统奥巴马和现任总统特朗普一直在敦促如果中国希望成为高收入国家并避免中等收入陷阱，就该刺激消费。

China’s financial situation is not in crisis the way some observers suggest.

中国经济状况并不如一些观察员所说那样处于危机中。

Although “balanced” sounds good and “unbalanced” bad, those perceptions are misguided. Unbalanced growth is an inevitable but unintended consequence of a largely successful long-term development process. A decline in consumption as a share of GDP and a commensurate increase in investment actually comes from the movement of migrant workers from labor-intensive rural activities to more capital-intensive industrial jobs in cities. In the process, the share of consumption to GDP automatically declines even though consumption per person or household increases. In labor-surplus countries like China, farmers consume most of what they produce; thus, the share of consumption relative to agriculture output is high.

虽然“平衡”看似很好“不平衡”很坏，但这种观念存在误导性。不平衡的经济增长是一个长期发展过程中不可避免的结果。消费占GDP比重下降的同时，相应的投资也有所增长并带动劳动力从劳动密集型企业转向资本密集型企业。在这一过程中，尽管人均消费额或者家庭消费额有所增长，但消费占GDP的比重依旧会自动下降。在中国等劳动力过剩国家中，农民往往自产自销；因此相对于农业产出，消费占比很高。

When the farmer moves to an urban-based industrial job, such as assembling computers, he is paid a wage that is several multiples of what he was previously earning in agriculture; thus, his personal consumption increases considerably. But labor costs (and thus personal consumption) as a share of the value of an industrial product is relatively small compared with the costs of the components and the factory. Thus, the steady transfer of labor from agriculture to industry leads to a decline in the share of consumption to GDP but an increase in consumption per worker. Unbalanced growth has thus led to a rise in household living standards and China becoming a major manufacturing and trading power—much as it once did for Japan and South Korea and, a century before that, in the United States.

当农民进城在工厂寻找电脑组装工等工作时，他就能得到几倍于种地的薪水；因此，他的个人消费额会有显着增长。而人工成本（以及个人消费）作为生产成本的一部分，相对于零部件成本和工厂运营成本来说简直微不足道。在劳动力从农业平稳转向制造业的过程中会导致消费总额占GDP比重降低，但人均消费额增长。中国不平衡的经济增长也带来了人民生活水平的提高，并让中国成为了主要的制造和贸易大国——就像曾经的日本和韩国以及一个世纪前的美国。

Beyond so-called unbalanced growth, world financial markets have also been fixated on China’s surging debt-to-GDP ratio and a property bubble. Experts such as the former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff and agencies such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and Moody’s have warned that all economies that have incurred comparable increases in debt have experienced a financial crisis and that there is no reason why China should be any different.

除了所谓的不平衡增长，世界金融市场也一直在关注中国急剧增长的债务占GDP比重以及房地产泡沫。包括前国际货币基金组织总裁罗格夫等经济专家和国际清算银行，穆迪等机构一直警告所有有过类似债务增长的经济体都经历过金融危机，中国也不例外。

Yet China is, in fact, different—not because it is immune to financial pressures, but because of the structure of its economic system. The more optimistic observers point out that most of China’s debt is public rather than private, sourced domestically rather than externally, and that household balance sheets are typically strong. But neither the optimists nor the pessimists recognize that, a decade ago, China did not have a significant private property market. Once that market was created, credit surged into establishing market-based values for land—whose value was previously hidden in a socialist system. The fivefold increase in property prices over the past decade is the consequence.

但中国的确与众不同——不是因为其对经济危机免疫而是因为其独特的经济结构。乐观的经济观察家指出中国持有的大部分债务都是公共债务而不是私人债务，来自于国内而不是国外，家庭资产负债表也很坚挺。但无论乐观者还是悲观者都没有意识到。10年前的中国甚至不存在房地产交易。房地产市场建立后，信贷资金大规模涌入并迅速建立了市场主导的土地交易制度——其价值曾深藏在社会主义制度中。结果是过去十年里中国的房地产价格上涨了5倍。

The question now is whether current asset prices are sustainable. If they are not, a debt crisis is plausible. On that score, housing inventory has declined in recent years and affordability has improved. Many analysts have compared China’s housing prices with other major cities to get a sense of whether they are too high. But usually such comparisons are with much richer cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. Few realized that compared to India, prices in China’s megacities are actually much lower.

现在的问题是当前的资产价格是否可持续。如果不可持续，债务危机看似就在眼前。在这一点上，住房库存近年来有所减少支付能力也有所提高。很多分析师也将中国当前房地产价格与其他大城市进行比较，试图弄清楚房价是否太高了。但他们常用香港，新加坡以及东京等生活水平更高的城市进行比较。很少有人认识到如果与印度相比，中国大城市的房价实际上很低。

China’s financial situation does warrant serious attention, but it is not in crisis the way some observers suggest. Although China’s largely state-owned banking system has been too lax in its lending practices, the excessive pressure for credit expansion comes from local governments, which do not have the authority to raise revenue needed to fund the social and infrastructure services to support a rapidly growing economy. They have survived only because they have been able to borrow from state-owned banks to finance these expenditures. Thus, China’s debt problem is not so much a sign of typical banking problems but rather the consequence of a weak fiscal system.

中国的财政状况也受到了很多关注，但很多观察家也承认并不存在危机。尽管中国的大型国有银行系统的借贷政策很宽松，信贷扩张的过度压力只存在于地方政府，而这些地方政府没有能力筹集资金为社会和基础设施服务提供资金以支持经济快速增长。他们能存活下来的原因只是他们能从国有银行借钱平衡收支。因此，中国的债务问题并不代表银行存在问题而是财政制度存在脆弱性。