[分享](连载)国外主流媒体对中国经济发展的一些评论(原汁英语)

In China's Frontier, a Fortune Is Made
With 'Know-Who' and Financing, Yan Became Nation's Second-Richest Man

By Peter S. Goodman

Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 17, 2006; Page A01

BAOTOU, China -- The Communist Party officials who run this grimy steel town on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia had big ambitions but little finance. So they called in one of China's most successful capitalists, Yan Jiehe, and let him handle almost everything.
Yan used the same plan he has applied across China's vast hinterland in amassing one of the country's largest personal fortunes: His company, China Pacific Construction Group, put up nearly all the money, hired workers and bought materials. On dark and muddy roads, workers added pavement and streetlights shaped like flowers. In the lonely center of the city, they inserted six public squares and statues of Genghis Khan. The city will pay in installments.
Yan's little-money-down financing has gained his company more than $50 billion in construction contracts since it was launched four years ago, elevating China Pacific into the largest private employer in the land, with more than 100,000 workers. Yan was recently ranked as China's second-richest man by analyst Hu Run, whose annual list of the wealthy has become a national event. Yan's personal assets were estimated at $1.6 billion, trailing only the $1.75 billion fortune amassed by Huang Guangyu, founder of Gome, a chain of discount electronics shops.
"I was going to be number one," Yan, 45, said in an interview. "I have villas and apartments in Nanjing and Shanghai. I drive a BMW. I have a Mercedes-Benz, a Cadillac, a Lincoln Town Car. I have everything. But in China, the bigger the tree, the more wind it catches. I knew being listed as the richest man would be asking for trouble, so I pushed to be ranked lower."
The turns by which the former schoolteacher rose to the ranks of the ultra-rich demonstrate the frontier nature of China's construction boom and the enormous sums being spent on highways, bridges and skyscrapers. They also show the hybrid nature of business in a land no longer communist yet not fully capitalist and the importance of cultivating ties with the local party officials who still determine what gets built.
"In China, it's not the know-how, it's the know-who," said David Chen, chief executive of MKA Capital Inc., an aircraft leasing and finance company based in Shanghai. "The government still controls lots of things. If you're a contractor or a real estate developer, you need a license. You need the land. You need to work with the government and you need people to be on your side. That's why all the nightclubs are full every night and why all the high-end restaurants have private rooms. People are in there talking business."
As word of Yan's wealth filtered into the Chinese press in recent weeks, he has tasted controversy. Critics assert that he built his fortune by exploiting the vanity of officials in backward places, sating their hunger for trophy projects when they should be investing in services for the poor.
"I hate businesspeople like Yan," said Zuo Dapei, a senior economist at the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the China Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "They are making fools of local government officials. In remote areas, many officials are unsophisticated, and their good intentions can be exploited by shrewd businesspeople. But others are just acting. When bribes are involved, they just pretend to be foolish."
Yan acknowledged that he targets "remote, underdeveloped provinces" lacking in finance and construction expertise. He said he fronts the costs because that allows him to make deals directly with local officials and avoid competition, enjoying average profit margins of 35 percent. "It makes the profit margin much higher when you have no competitive bidding," Yan said.
Yan made no apologies, portraying himself as a rainmaker able to spread urban development far from China's wealthier coastal areas.
"Local governments often don't have much capital, but they really want to build infrastructure," Yan said. "So my model is very popular. Before, I had to approach local governments. Now, they come to us."
In the past two years, the central government has limited investment to slow the pace of growth in China, fearing that a potentially disastrous real estate bubble is being fueled by loose credit. Beijing has frowned on Yan's approach, asserting that it finances roads to nowhere, fortress-like government buildings and other boondoggles. In January, the central government banned such financing.
The decree aims to curb the obsession with infrastructure projects," said Liu Fuyuan, deputy director of the Academy of Macroeconomic Research in Beijing, a unit of the state Development and Reform Commission, which guides economic policy.
Still, Yan expressed confidence that business would roll on. "I've secured all these contracts and they are going to be completed," he said. "China is so big that you cannot have one rule for all places. Americans have very strict laws, but China has very flexible laws. And where American companies focus on business issues, Chinese enterprises focus on personal relationships."
Yan was born in 1960 in the coastal province of Jiangsu, the youngest of nine children. His parents were schoolteachers. They occupied a comfortable brick house near the home of the premier and diplomat Zhou Enlai. But as the chaos of the Cultural Revolution exploded in the mid-1960s, Yan's family was sent to a poor village. There, they lived without enough blankets to cut the winter chill, subsisting on rice husks normally reserved for pigs.
"After all those hardships, I wanted to live a good life," Yan said in the interview, reclining in a leather-backed chair in the library of a five-star hotel in Shanghai. Trim and casual with slicked hair, he wore a zippered jacket, dark slacks and black leather loafers.
In his 20s, Yan was a schoolteacher on track to become an administrator at a high school in his hometown of Huaian. His wages were about $150 per month, plus health insurance and a pension. But in 1986, with China early in its economic transformation, he joined those "jumping into the sea," relinquishing the stability of the state system for the new business world.
He took a job as a clerk at a local cement factory, earning a mere $10 a month. His relatives fretted. But three months later he was appointed manager, securing $500 a month and a perch from which he would amass an empire.
Yan expanded into the construction-materials business by taking over a bankrupt state-owned collective. In 1992, he won a $1 million road-building contract in Nanjing, the provincial capital. The following year, he got the rights to build a section of a new highway linking Shanghai to Nanjing. He launched his first private business in 1995, Jiangsu Pacific Engineering Ltd., a construction company focused on projects in the province.
The business model that would make Yan rich took shape in 2002 with the launching of China Pacific. Yan took control of 17 state-owned companies with assets exceeding $750 million, according to the state press. In many instances, he bought them without putting up any cash by packaging successful operations with bankrupt factories, relieving local officials of having to pay pensions to retirees and compensate fired workers.
In China, many private businesses have been launched with assets from state-owned firms. Yan declined to detail where he got his capital.
"When one project succeeds, I invest the winnings in a bigger project," he said.
In Baotou, a broad city laid out on a grid where the grasslands yield to the desert, Yan found a willing customer. The area has substantial precious metal deposits. Officials want to develop roads to attract investment. They had in mind a concrete overpass linking the regional highway to their downtown.
"It's our grand entranceway," said an official in the city's Ministry of Transportation, who spoke on condition that he not be identified, citing rules barring unauthorized contact with foreign journalists. "The overpass gives visitors the impression that we are a civilized city."
Baotou first put the project out for bid, awarding a contract to a state-owned company. But capital controls deprived that firm of needed bank finance, opening the way for Yan.
Since setting up an office here in the spring of 2004, Yan and his representatives had feasted with local officials inside traditional Mongolian yurts, toasting with porcelain cups of horse-milk liquor and dining on such local delicacies as stewed camel's foot. In the fall of 2004, Yan's company landed a $23 million contract to build the overpass. The job was finished last July.
Next, Yan's firm renovated a boulevard known as "Corruption Street," its sidewalks lined with karaoke lounges and massage parlors. It built a 10-lane strip of concrete linking City Hall to the railway station, then added lights and a grand entrance to the government center. This year, China Pacific plans to put in a riverfront promenade.
For Yan and his company, the isolated city is now the source of contracts worth as much as $1.5 billion.
Honest money, Yan said. "All the Chinese media has been questioning whether I've gotten my contracts through closed-door dealing. But the prosecutor has never come to look for any trouble. Everything is transparent."

Special correspondent Eva Woo contributed to this report.

[此贴子已经被作者于2006-3-23 10:49:53编辑过]

China to Tax Luxury Goods
The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; 7:57 AM
SHANGHAI, China -- China has announced several new sales taxes, on goods ranging from disposable wooden chopsticks to luxury items such as yachts, citing a need to protect the environment and redress the gap between rich and poor.
The Finance Ministry announced the change in policy, which takes effect April 1, on Tuesday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

China on Wednesday announced plans to impose a 5 percent consumption tax on disposable wooden chopsticks, in an effort to discourage consumption of items that are blamed for wasting scarce timber resources. China makes about 15 billion pairs of throwaway chopsticks a year, consuming some 2 million cubic meters (71 million cubic feet) of wood. The new tax takes effect on April 1.
Buyers of yachts, golf balls and golf clubs will face a 10 percent tax, while luxury watches will be taxed at a rate of 20 percent, it said.
The change reflects the communist leadership's goals of countering the widening gap between rich and poor and of protecting the environment, which has been ravaged by more than two decades of industrialization.
The current tax on skin care and hair care products such as shampoo will end on April 1, the report said. That tax was imposed in 1994, when such products were still considered luxuries. Thanks to China's rising level of affluence, they are now viewed as daily necessities.
The 5 percent taxes on disposable wooden chopsticks and on wooden floor panels are intended to discourage consumption of items that are blamed for wasting scarce timber resources, the ministry said.
China makes about 15 billion pairs of throwaway chopsticks a year, consuming some 71 million cubic feet of wood, the report said.
To discourage waste of petroleum products, the government will levy taxes on solvents, lubricants and aviation fuel, the ministry said. But the taxes will be only partially imposed to help cushion the impact on industries already facing price hikes due to rising crude oil prices.
The report did not say if taxes on other products would also change. They include cigarettes, alcohol, jewelry, fireworks, gasoline, diesel, vehicle tires, motorcycles and compact cars.

China Can't Afford Higher Iron Ore Prices

By ELAINE KURTENBACH

The Associated Press
Friday, March 17, 2006; 2:21 AM

SHANGHAI, China -- China cannot afford to pay higher prices for iron ore this year, officials say, signaling Beijing's determination to wield more leverage in negotiations for key strategic commodities.
"Chinese steel and iron enterprises are facing many problems so China cannot accept another price rise. The companies' costs keep increasing while their profits drop," said a statement issued by the Ministry of Commerce and the National Development and Reform Commission, China's main planning agency.
State-owned steel makers would not be able to accept an increase in iron ore prices this year, following a 71.5 percent price hike in 2005, said the statement, seen Friday on the Commerce Ministry's Web site.
China's iron ore imports from Australia, Brazil and other producers rose 37 percent last year amid high demand for steel for manufacturing and building.
The ministry earlier had warned it would take unspecified measures to protect its steel makers if talks with foreign suppliers of iron ore fail to produce reasonable prices.
"This is the first step by China to limit commodity prices. We believe China will likely develop a comprehensive strategy to deal with commodity prices," Andy Xie, an economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong wrote in a report released Thursday.
Chinese buyers, led by Shanghai-based Baosteel Group, are in the midst of price negotiations with leading suppliers BHP Billiton Ltd. and Rio Tinto Group of Australia and Brazil's Companhia Vale do Rio Doce.
Those suppliers reportedly are seeking price increases of 15 percent to 20 percent, to take effect from April 1.
Last year's jump in iron ore prices prompted a round of complaints over China's apparent lack of bargaining power in the negotiations, despite the fact that last year it imported 275 million tons, or about 43 percent of total worldwide production.
Chinese analysts say the country's huge demand for resources such as oil, iron ore and nonferrous metals should give it more say in the prices it pays for such commodities. Many manufacturers are being squeezed because prices for their products are failing to keep pace with rising costs for key industrial supplies.
The government's statement accused unnamed international suppliers of exploiting their position to "reap high and unreasonable monopoly profits" and violate free trade.
"Stable prices benefit establishing a fair international economic order and will realize a win-win cooperation for both resource producing and consuming countries," it said.
Although China's market reforms have transformed its major steel makers into modern, international corporations, the government still plays a key role in regulating the strategically important industry.
"The government's role is necessary for big deals; foreign parties are monopolies while Chinese parties are diversified and do not have significant bargaining power," the state-run newspaper China Daily quoted Mei Xinyu, a Commerce Ministry researcher, as saying.
Late last year, the country's major steel industry association demanded that companies cut back on output to help prevent a glut that could lead to damaging price cuts.
This year, the government intends to control steel output by closing down inefficient, low-quality iron and steel factories, keeping output at around 400 million tons. Last year's total output was 385 million tons according to the Brussels-based International Iron & Steel Institute, or about 30 percent of total worldwide output.
The cuts are expected to reduce China's total iron ore demand by 60 million tons, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.

农民没产权不可能普遍致富。

那些通过各种手段方法致富的农民，在这个过程里如果没有产权，将会十分被动。

This idea is terrific, can you creat another region to provide some essays about industry agglomeration(产业集聚)。3ks very much!

斑竹，能不能你上传啊，，让我们下载，这样版面好像很乱。你可以给出简介啊。

If the words are bigger,it's better.

这些材料很不错。本来我想对每份材料做一个点评，可是时间有限，我就简单说明。政策向农村倾斜是中央的一项战略措施，农村经济的发展直接关系着我国的内需，这是相互制约的，进而影响长远发展。这些措施是没有问题的，然而土地是一个不可回避的问题，农民最根本的是土地。在我国这样一个有着8亿多农民的过度，如果仅靠想城市流动是不可能解决问题的，城市也有城市的问题，农民进城镇也会给城市带来很多问题，如交通、居住、医疗卫生、教育等问题，建设社会主义新农村是必须的。土地基础设施是农村经济的载体，厂房设备都需要在土地上展开，因而土地在农村扮演了一个很重要的角色。然而，土地自由买卖只会使我们回到土地革命，如果要中国再走一边资本主义制度变革的历程，是不可能的，也是行不通的。所以产权改革并不是万能的，我们的改革一有问题就爱提产权不明晰，只有产权明晰，才能发展。所有权和使用权的问题在我个人认为应该规范化，而不是所有权的私有，我们是社会主义国家，尤其是农村经济是集体经济。而现在的问题是集体经济成了某些人的经济。很多农村都是这种情况，原因就是不规范，缺乏制度的硬约束和监督的无效，而且还存在不少黑势力。所以农村并不是产权能够解决的，因为我们的农民8亿多，就算城市转移3亿，5亿也是不小的数字。城市又出现了新的问题。中央推进城镇化建设是明智的，只是应该进一步规范。同时也提到内需问题，进出口贸易占据了内需的很大一部分，投资、出口、消费是拉动消费的三架马车，然而正如文中所述，出口是比例很大的贡献，投资次之，消费则只占很小比例，这就与农村联系起来了。关于教育问题，这是一个很不好处理的问题，教育投资原意上要拉动消费，可结果并不如人意，拉动富有人群消费方面作用不大，引起了信用教育投资，又把银行牵扯进了。这些问题越说就是整体了，从农村的发展可窥见我国经济的发展，毕竟城市不是先天就存在的。我说这么多，当然上面的材料并没有一一细看，但是很不错，希望大家讨论，如果有很好的理论水平和实践基础，也可以讨论政策建议，国家兴亡，匹夫有责。感谢版主！如有时间，其他条件也具备，我会做更详细规范的讨论。因为我们关注的是发展经济的问题。

以下是引用三石一号在2006-4-23 8:40:00的发言：

这些材料很不错。本来我想对每份材料做一个点评，可是时间有限，我就简单说明。政策向农村倾斜是中央的一项战略措施，农村经济的发展直接关系着我国的内需，这是相互制约的，进而影响长远发展。这些措施是没有问题的，然而土地是一个不可回避的问题，农民最根本的是土地。在我国这样一个有着8亿多农民的过度，如果仅靠想城市流动是不可能解决问题的，城市也有城市的问题，农民进城镇也会给城市带来很多问题，如交通、居住、医疗卫生、教育等问题，建设社会主义新农村是必须的。土地基础设施是农村经济的载体，厂房设备都需要在土地上展开，因而土地在农村扮演了一个很重要的角色。然而，土地自由买卖只会使我们回到土地革命，如果要中国再走一边资本主义制度变革的历程，是不可能的，也是行不通的。所以产权改革并不是万能的，我们的改革一有问题就爱提产权不明晰，只有产权明晰，才能发展。所有权和使用权的问题在我个人认为应该规范化，而不是所有权的私有，我们是社会主义国家，尤其是农村经济是集体经济。而现在的问题是集体经济成了某些人的经济。很多农村都是这种情况，原因就是不规范，缺乏制度的硬约束和监督的无效，而且还存在不少黑势力。所以农村并不是产权能够解决的，因为我们的农民8亿多，就算城市转移3亿，5亿也是不小的数字。城市又出现了新的问题。中央推进城镇化建设是明智的，只是应该进一步规范。同时也提到内需问题，进出口贸易占据了内需的很大一部分，投资、出口、消费是拉动消费的三架马车，然而正如文中所述，出口是比例很大的贡献，投资次之，消费则只占很小比例，这就与农村联系起来了。关于教育问题，这是一个很不好处理的问题，教育投资原意上要拉动消费，可结果并不如人意，拉动富有人群消费方面作用不大，引起了信用教育投资，又把银行牵扯进了。这些问题越说就是整体了，从农村的发展可窥见我国经济的发展，毕竟城市不是先天就存在的。我说这么多，当然上面的材料并没有一一细看，但是很不错，希望大家讨论，如果有很好的理论水平和实践基础，也可以讨论政策建议，国家兴亡，匹夫有责。感谢版主！如有时间，其他条件也具备，我会做更详细规范的讨论。因为我们关注的是发展经济的问题。

学术角度同意～～^_^

建议：能否做成word这样便于交流！因为有的学校的包月上不了外网！！