As China’s Economic Power Increases, Questions Arise
A worker cleans a bullet train at a high speed railway maintenance station during the travel rush period that happens around Chinese Lunar New Year.Credit Jianan Yu/Reuters
HONG KONG — I was waiting for a train in a remote town in southwest China last year when a young man marched up to me and barked out a question: Did I understand and accept that China is a great power?
It was a telling moment.
Had I been waiting at the same train station 10 years, five years, maybe two years earlier, I would have had to catch a slow-moving service that dropped me at Chongqing an hour and a half later. And the young man probably would have been almost deferential to a tall Westerner, and maybe asked whether I liked his hometown. Instead, I was about to catch a bullet train that dropped me at my destination in just 36 minutes. And his bold question underscored the pride Chinese people take in their country’s recent, quick growth, a pride that has fostered a new assertiveness toward China’s neighbors and the West.
Lately I’ve been spending time in small towns in other parts of the world, asking myself and the people I interview similar questions: What does China’s growth mean for them? And how are their lives changing as China turns into an international economic and financial powerhouse with a stake in practically every country?
These questions are far removed from those I asked when I began reporting on China’s economy years ago.
The New York Times transferred me from Detroit to Hong Kong in 2002, and I began visiting manufacturing facilities all over China. The country’s international ascent did not seem assured.
At a car factory in Harbin in northeastern China, I saw the latest, most expensive Japanese and German robots bolted to the floor in what was clearly an impractical layout. When I insisted on going through a door at the back, I found a vast number of workers equipped mostly with hand tools who were putting together cars on an antiquated assembly line.
Now China is the world’s largest car producer; with output that has increased tenfold since I arrived in Asia, and the country’s factories are among the most modern. China’s high-speed rail network is the envy of the world, with full trains leaving as often as every five minutes to take passengers distances that would take three times longer if attempted on United States highways.
China’s prosperity has trickled down to blue-collar workers to an extent seldom appreciated in the West.
When I started visiting mainland Chinese factories near Hong Kong in 2002, workers still lived eight to a room on bunk beds in dormitories with a single window fan, conditions that I still see on reporting trips elsewhere in Asia. Often workers wore the same dull cotton jackets and smocks that their parents wore on the farms they had left, and that they expected to return to one day.
By 2010, when I covered strikes against Japanese-owned factories in southeastern China, I found workers with their own rooms in shared apartments, and even renting studio apartments by themselves, equipped with air-conditioners and DVD players. Their tattered cotton jackets have been replaced by denim, tastefully torn in the right places, with glossy jackets and many-hued tattoos.
Since then, blue-collar wages have surged faster than food prices or rent, though very few earn enough to afford China’s stratospheric apartment prices. The air and water pollution in Chinese factory towns now rank among the worst in the world.
Rapid economic growth has not produced the political liberalization many scholars in the West had predicted. During my early trips to factory towns across China, I noted broad enthusiasm for the United States. But in the years since, attitudes toward the West seem to have hardened, particularly outside of cosmopolitan cities like Beijing or Shanghai.
China is clearly entering an important phase in its evolution. So the timing seemed right for a
on China’s growing financial and economic importance and its implications for the world, working with a range of colleagues around the world.
America’s policy of “constructive engagement” with China is based partly on the idea that close economic ties might help produce a less authoritarian, less confrontational China. The policy has also been based partly on the worry that if China suffered an economic meltdown, political chaos could ensue.
New questions are starting to surface. What if China replaces the West as the dominant lender and investor in projects around the globe? What does it mean if the main source of foreign investment is a country whose diplomats passionately defend the principle that state leaders around the world have the right to do whatever they want — sometimes including widespread human rights abuse — within their own borders? Will China, having suffered heavy environmental damage during its own industrialization, inflict similar damage on other countries?
Chinese investments in Ecuador and the Ecuadorean oil industry provide a good lens through which to explore the question. Ecuador is obviously a lot closer to the United States than China. It is also a sizable exporter of oil, a commodity of geopolitical interest for readers and statesmen alike. And with natural wonders ranging from the Amazon to the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador is an attractive destination for Americans.
Cliff Krauss, my partner for the first installment of the series of stories about China, brought unique skills to the assignment. He is not only our long-serving Houston bureau chief and chief energy writer, he previously spent many years covering Latin America. Cliff began interviewing American experts and was soon on his way to Ecuador, crisscrossing the country from the jungles of the Amazon and the Chinese embassy in Quito to the fishing port of Manta and the broad plateau where Chinese companies may build a vast oil refinery.
I contacted energy experts in Hong Kong and mainland China and started traveling from my base in Hong Kong to New York, Washington and elsewhere to look for further examples of China’s ever-growing economic and financial influence.
As the year progressed, China’s importance seemed to increase. A succession of American allies broke ranks with the Obama administration in the spring and signed up instead to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The International Monetary Fund seems increasingly likely to designate the Chinese RMB as a reserve currency. China’s central bank has begun taking a series of steps to ease controls on overseas investments by the country’s companies.
Two years ago I was at a high-speed train station in Changsha in south-central China; I was surprised to learn that the next 10 bullet trains to Guangzhou, each carrying up to 1,300 people and departing every five minutes, were already sold out, even though it was not a holiday. Many of those at the station were migrant workers, not affluent businesspeople, and they were very proud of China and what it has become.
The question is whether the rest of the world will welcome that speed, drive and determination when it shows up on its doorstep in the form of Chinese foreign investment and overseas lending.
Keith Bradsher is the Hong Kong bureau chief of The New York Times and a senior writer covering Asian economics and business.
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