The Challenge of China-- Foxconn Cont'd

I do not see it as a sad state of affairs, or at least not completely. As I said in the essay it is quite a complex scenario that at least in my view defies easy labels and slogans.  I guess that is part of the point that I did not make well. Millions, perhaps hundreds of millions have been lifted from abject poverty. Perhaps they are not Americans, but I have looked in their faces and seen their smiles. It is not all good, but much of what I have seen is, and I am fortunate to have been witness. As late as last week, I shared meals with office workers who are maybe just a generation from the peasant life. To put this in perspective this would sort of what it would be like if Daniel Boone were my uncle. The Chinese have crammed decades of development into thirty years, not quite two generations.   In forty years they have risen from the madness of Mao and the cultural revolution to the gleaming cities of Shanghai.

 I was thinking as I sat at yet another business dinner with a dozen people, only one of whom actually spoke English, how much I like these people, their easy smiles, their laughter,  their (in some cases) truly revolting eating habits. Late last week, we had a traditional lazy Susan Chinese meal. As always way too much food was ordered. I was actually wondering who would get the doggy bags, but then there were four QC guys, No English at all their, just country people with a thin veneer of training, in which we entrust our quality control. (Good Luck with that…) Well, those guys ate, and they ate, and they ate, until their plates were piled high with the refuse of chicken feet, crab shells, & snails. They ate like people, who perhaps at another time in their life did not have so much. And I thought that with one or two exceptions everyone at this table was born after the Cultural Revolution in the late 60’s, and many after the reforms of Deng in the late 1970’s. These people have little context in which to put their current surroundings, other than WOW, what a feast. I do not mean to suggest that they are unwise just that the primary prism through which they see relations between the US and China is the one that puts this food in front of them and that of their families.

 What I do see as sad, is the way the US has divested itself in research & development over these past couple decades. Americans can blame the Chinese, but there are 3 billion people in the world living on wages or farming that barely sustain them. High labor low cost merchandise were it not be made in China would certainly be made somewhere else other than the US. Indeed, as worker protections and wages rise in China some of the lowest cost manufacturing is already starting to migrate. Pandering to the right,  pissed off at the commies, or the left, through protectionist measures, will not solve the issue. Neither in fact really even addresses the challenges.  What the US needs is retraining, and investment and a vision for the future. The Chinese are going to and are well on the way to beating America in the rush to create the newest green technologies, high spread trains, and so forth. The jobs created by his will require high degrees of education and substantial training. In other words these are high wage jobs that we should be chasing. In this race, speed to market and technology beats low wages. That we are losing that battle, lost in political hackery and jingoism is the real cause to be sad. All consumers, everywhere around the world, make decisions based on the best value, or the lowest cost or both. This is not intrinsically American by any means. It is easy to forget that even here in America, the median wage is below $30,000 per year. At $30K per year, strolling the aisles, the Chinese t-shirt at $15 looks a lot more appealing than the American one at $25, and  the truth is that America manufacturing will never again produce the lowest price t-shirt, or imitation jewelry, or even cutlery, but the things we can produce, the things we should produce are lost in the failure of Solyndra and mindless politics.

As the US argues with yahoos on the right on whether or not global warming exists, the Chinese are planning for the post fossil fuel world. They will not accede to Kyoto for reasons of current development, but they have made long term investments in the range of nearly a trillion dollars in green energy and so have placed their bets on the future. What can we say? The entire Republican field argues that Global Warning is some sort of leftist commie plot? These same politicians endorse tax policies that rewards the  transfer of jobs and capital overseas. That's a reason for sadness...