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FOLLOW THE MONEY: IS TAIWAN ALREADY THE NEW HONG KONG?
APR 19, 2005 - 12:27PM PDT
SHANTOU, GUANGDONG PROVINCE, CHINA
by Peter Herford
In China there’s been a year’s worth of growth in the few months since my last dispatch. You name it, and it has grown in China. Some examples: the Chinese trade surplus, the Chinese trade surplus with the U.S., and the Chinese trade balance with the rest of Asia, which has gone from deficit to surplus. The numbers are staggering. Just a few months ago I wrote, “China herself is a debtor in much of the rest of the world. Particularly in Asia.” True then. Wrong now. About the only deficit remaining for the Chinese is with their Middle Eastern oil suppliers, and that is not enough to push China into a net debt column. It’s now surplus all the way. There has also been a shift in editorial interest in the U.S. The New York Times and the Washington Post now have stories from China on the average of every second or third day. I haven’t been able to keep up with USA Today and the Los Angeles Times to know whether they have increased their reporting from China, but the trends are clear. The traditional broadcast networks still treat China as if it were not there. Condoleezza Rice recently had her first visit to Beijing and barely a trickle made it onto American broadcast TV. The cable networks, particularly their Asian services covered the story more fully. One consequence of relatively thin coverage of China: My Western friends who make their first visits to the Peoples Republic are slack jawed after 24 hours. Their reactions are always the same “I had no idea.” “This is not the China I expected to see.” “This certainly doesn’t look very Communist,” was one recent reaction from a visiting television executive who came to teach media management in Nanjing. As we rode in from the airport I pointed out the symbol I thought China might consider adding to its bright red flag: the construction crane. Chinese construction cranes in all cities are like forests in the Pacific Northwest or northern Minnesota. Like most airports in China, Nanjing’s International Airport is located far from the city, a legacy of its original military origins, but now transformed into a gleaming new arched passenger terminal with fingers reaching out in all directions, designed for traffic yet to come. It’s a 40-minute ride into town, and we counted 134 construction cranes visible from the expressway. Multiply that by the other four approaches to the city and it’s a reasonable guess that Nanjing likely has more than 500 construction cranes at work. Apartment complexes in China do not go up one at a time. They go up in clusters. A cluster is often 20 and 30 buildings, each with from 15 to 40 floors. Apartment prices are around US$120 per square foot in China’s medium-size cities. (In China, a medium size city is one with a population of only five to seven million people.) Shanghai has plenty of apartments that cost US $1 million. Yes there is…... FULL TEXT
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