Страница 56 из 142
The third effect of China ’s rise concerns the impact of its economic scale on the rest of the world. China ’s average a
The fourth effect is the impact China will have on world trade. Before the Open Door policy, China was one of the world’s most closed economies. In 1970 its export trade made up only 0.7 per cent of the world’s total: at the end of the seventies, China ’s imports and exports together represented 12 per cent of its GDP, the lowest in the world. China ’s economic impact on the rest of the world was minimal for two reasons: firstly, the country was very poor, and secondly, it was very closed. But since 1978 China has rapidly become one of the world’s most open economies. Its average import tariff rate will decline from 23.7 per cent in 2001 to 5.7 per cent in 2011, with most of that fall having already taken place. [559] Although its trade dependency (the proportion of GDP accounted for by exports and imports) was less than 10 per cent in 1978, by 2004 it had risen to 70 per cent, much higher than that of other large countries. China has now overtaken the United States to become the second largest exporter in the world, while in 2004 it ranked as the world’s third largest importer, accounting for 5.9 per cent of the global total. By 2010 a developing country, in the shape of China, will for the first time become the world’s biggest trader.
Each of these scale effects — population, labour, economy and trade — clearly has a mainly positive impact on the rest of the world, stimulating overall global growth and the expansion of national economies. But the fifth effect, China’s consumption of resources, has a largely negative global impact: because the country is so poorly endowed with natural resources, its population so enormous and its economic development so intensive, its demand for natural resources has the double effect of raising the price of raw materials and depleting the world’s stock of them, a process that, on the basis of recent trends, is likely to accelerate in the future.
CHINA’S GLOBAL ECONOMIC IMPACT
Although China remains a poor country, its per capita GDP only reaching $1,000 in 2003, it is already having a profound impact on the world. Along with the United States it has been the main engine of global economic growth, contributing no less than one-third of the world’s growth in real output between 2002 and 2005. It has been widely credited with having pulled Japan out of its long-ru
By far the greatest impact of China ’s rise has been felt in East Asia. The main gainers have been the developed Asian tigers of North-East Asia — South Korea and Taiwan, together with Japan. They have been the beneficiaries of cheap manufactured goods produced in China while at the same time enjoying growing demand from China for their knowledge and capital-intensive products. [563] Their own companies have relocated many of their operations to China to take advantage of much cheaper labour, as in the case of the Taiwanese computer industry. [564] The losers have been the same as those in the West, namely those workers displaced by operations outsourced to China. Unlike the United States, which has a huge trade deficit with China, all of these countries enjoy large surpluses with China. The nearest example in the region to a grey area is South-East Asia, whose economies are not so dissimilar to that of China, though Singapore and Malaysia, in particular, are rather more developed. Over the last decade, the ASEAN countries have seen a large slice of the foreign direct investment they previously received going to China. They have also lost out to China in the mass assembly of electronic and computer equipment — Singapore and Malaysia being notable examples — and have, as a consequence, been forced to move up the value chain in to order to escape Chinese competition. [565] The country that has suffered the greatest is Indonesia, whose economy most closely resembles that of China. Indonesia has lost out to China in terms of direct investment by foreign multinationals, which have opted for China rather than Indonesia as their preferred production base. On balance, however, China’s growth has greatly benefited the ASEAN countries too, with China now comfortably ensconced as their largest trading partner, one of their biggest markets (if not the biggest), and in many cases their main provider of inward investment. [566]
A measure of China’s growing impact on the world is the leverage that it enjoys in its relationship with the United States (notwithstanding the fact that the United States still enjoys a much larger GDP than China and an immensely higher GDP per head) as a result of the economic imbalances which lie at the heart of their relationship. China is comfortably the largest exporter to the US, with Americans displaying an enormous appetite for Made in China consumer products. As the United States exports relatively little to China, the latter has enjoyed a large and rising trade surplus which has grown very rapidly since 1999. [567] China has invested this surplus in various forms of US debt, including Treasury bonds, agency bonds and corporate bonds — in effect, a Chinese loan to the US — thereby enabling American interest rates to be kept artificially low to the benefit of American consumers and especially, until the credit crunch, holders of mortgages. Although the US was deeply in debt, China’s continuing large-scale purchase of Treasury bonds (which I will use as shorthand for various forms of US assets held by China) allowed Americans to continue with their spending spree, and then partially helped to cushion the impact of the credit crunch. In September 2008 China ’s foreign currency reserves totalled $1.81 trillion — a sum greater than the a
[559] Yu Yongding, ‘The Interactions between China and the World Economy’, p. 4.
[560] ‘The Dragon and the Eagle Survey’, The Economist, 2 October 2004, p. 29.
[561] See, for example, Roger F. Noriega, ‘China’s Influence in the Western Hemisphere’, statement before the House Sub-committee on the Western Hemisphere, Washington, DC, 16 April 2005; Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists, p. 241; and Leni Wild and David Mepnam, eds, The New Sinosphere: China in Africa (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2006).
[562] Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists, p. 240; Shenkar, The Chinese Century, p. 110; ‘Latin Textile Makers Feel Chinese Pressure’, International Herald Tribune, 2 April 2007.
[563] Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists, p. 137.
[564] Ibid., p. 199.
[565] Shenkar, The Chinese Century, p. 113.
[566] Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Yee Wong, ‘Prospects for Regional Free Trade in Asia’, working paper, Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC, October 2005, p. 4; Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists, p. 226.
[567] Yu Yongding, ‘ China ’s Rise, Twin Surplus and the Change of China’s Development Strategy’, pp. 26–30.
[568] ‘ China ’s Reserves Near Milestone’, Wall Street Journal, 17 October 2006.