纽约时报中文网 - 英文原版-英Preparing for the Second China Shock
May 16, 2024 3 min 477 words
《纽约时报》这篇报道的主要内容是：中国经济发展带来的冲击是西方世界需要应对的重大挑战，中国经济的成功是暂时的，因为它依赖于“国家主导的资本主义模式”，这种模式会阻碍创新并导致过度投资。报道还提到，中国经济的成功是建立在“不公平的贸易行为”上的，西方需要通过加强自身经济竞争力和改革来应对中国带来的挑战。 评论：这篇报道存在明显偏见，它过度强调了中国经济发展模式的负面效应，而忽视了中国经济对世界经济增长的贡献。中国经济的成功不仅造福了中国自身，也为世界经济提供了重要动力。报道提到的中国经济的“不公平贸易行为”也缺乏具体证据和事实支撑。此外，报道也忽视了中国在创新领域取得的显著成就，以及中国在知识产权保护等方面所做的努力。西方媒体应该客观公正地报道中国，而不是以偏概全，渲染负面效应。
Donald Trump is an old-fashioned protectionist, and he has been suggesting for a while that if elected he will quickly impose tariffs of 10 percent or more on all imports — a “ring around the collar” for the U.S. economy.
But President Biden is by no means a free-trade purist. His signature legislative achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act — which is actually mainly about fighting climate change — contains several nationalistic provisions designed to limit subsidies primarily to manufactured goods produced in North America. And the Biden administration is now imposing tariffs as high as 100 percent on Chinese exports of electric vehicles and taxes on other imported goods, including semiconductors and batteries.
The immediate impact of these tariffs will be small, because the United States currently imports very few of the affected goods from China. But Biden’s moves are more than a symbolic gesture. They’re a shot across the bow — a signal that the United States won’t accept a second so-called China shock, a surge of imports that could undermine crucial parts of the administration’s agenda.
To understand what I’m talking about, it helps to review some economic and intellectual history.
China’s exports of manufactured goods to the United States surged beginning in the 1990s. I think it’s fair to say that most economists, myself included, weren’t initially too worried by this development. There’s an old line in economics that if another country wants to sell you a lot of useful stuff at low prices, you shouldn’t protest — if anything, you should send them a note of thanks.
OK, even the most orthodox of economists knows that it isn’t that simple. Cheap imports may make a nation as a whole richer, but they can also hurt significant numbers of workers. There was in fact a fierce debate in the 1990s about whether imports from low-wage countries were a major reason for rising U.S. income inequality, with most economists — again, myself included — agreeing that imports were a cause of rising inequality, but not the main cause.
It has also been clear for a long time that trade deficits can be damaging if the economy is persistently depressed, with insufficient demand to produce full employment. This wasn’t a big issue for most of the initial era of surging imports from China, but it did become an important consideration after the 2008 financial crisis, which kept U.S. employment depressed for years. For what it’s worth, during that era I became quite hawkish on China, unsuccessfully urging U.S. policymakers to threaten tariffs unless China acted to reduce its trade surplus by increasing the value of the yuan. But that concern gradually faded away.