Ted C. Fishman - China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World

CHINA IS EVERYWHERE THESE DAYS. POWERED BY THE WORLDS MOST rapidly changing large economy, it is influencing our lives as consumers, employees, and citizens. The words MADE IN CHINA are as universal as money: the nation sews more clothes and stitches more shoes and assembles more toys for the worlds children than any other. But moving up the technological ladder, China has also become the worlds largest maker of consumer electronics, pumping out more TVs, DVD players, and cell phones than any other country. And more recently, China is ascending even higher still, moving quickly and expertly into biotech and computer manufacturing. No country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once. No country plays the world economic game better than China. No other country shocks the global economic hierarchy like China.

Even a casual glimpse at the news tells us that something large looms in China. The nation is making parts for Boeing 757s and exploring space with its own domestically built rockets. China has between 100 and 160 cities with populations of 1 million or more (America by contrast has 9, while Eastern and Western Europe combined have 36.). China is buying oil fields internationally and also signing exclusive oil and gas supply deals with Saudi and Russian companies. China is buying the worlds scrap metal, as well as enormous amounts of steel, to fashion into products sold globally. The country is relentlessly positioning itself for ever-higher levels of industrialization. Its exporting computers with Chinese brand names. There are giant capital flows from industry to China now. Its where the world is investing. China is laying down fiber-optic at a rapid rate. China, which tried mightily and tragically to leapfrog from an agrarian economy to an advanced industrial state under Mao Zedong, now leapfrogs over many of the technologies of mature industrial states. Its phone system is more wireless than wired, and many of its big cities will soon have the most advanced rapid-transit systems in the world. Here are two metaphors, both true: China is drinking milk these days. The tallest starting center in the NBA, Yao Ming, is Chinese.

In the past, Chinas enormous population was hard to feed and employ. Now Chinas one-fifth of humanity must be seen anew: as the biggest market ever. As the customers of Citibank, Disney, Nokia, GE, Toyota, and Microsoft. As the critical mass in the coming order.

But even if you dont read the business pages, the impact of Chinas boom is hitting home in all sorts of ways both subtle and obvious that can be felt in our everyday reality:

• Mention an interest in China to your old friend who owns an industrial toolmaking shop and he confides that his factory, which was started by his father and has bought a comfortable suburban life for three generations of his family as well as good wages to hundreds of workers, is getting killed by the people over there.
• Talk to your family plumber, and first he complains that he spends all day replacing broken Chinese parts, and then he takes from his bag a Chinese part he says is better, sheepishly adding, Theyre actually pretty darn good now, and all we can get these days without spending a fortune.
• Run into a parent of a freshman from your daughters high school class, a mom youve seen for years at holiday concerts in which your two girls both play viola. The mom immigrated to the United States from China in 1995 to study solid-state physics and is now a researcher at the local medical school. She says shes going back to China to join a friends business that develops software for MRI machines and other high-tech medical devices. What about her research at the hospital? She says the opportunities in China now are too big to miss and she does not want to blame herself later.
• Mention this story to another friend, a world-famous researcher who studies the lives of cells, and he tells you that American university biology departments now exist, in essence, to transfer knowledge from old Jewish men to young Chinese women.
• Cross the street to the all-night city convenience store run by a family of Palestinian immigrants, and notice that behind the counter where cigarettes were once sold is a wall of no-name Chinese accessories for dozens of different brand-name cell phonesbatteries, car adapters, earphones, and casesnone for more than $12. Theyre selling great, the man at the cash register says.
• Meet a smart old high school friend who always wore thick glasses, but whose nose is now bare. He teaches English at a giant private language school in Shanghai but is home to show off the results of his $600 laser eye surgery, performed, he says, in an ultramodern Chinese clinic for a tenth the price the procedure would cost at home.
• Grab breakfast at a diner in St. Joseph, Michigan. One table over sit four men, each somewhere between the ages of thirty and sixty. They look as if they are dressed for factory work, but at 10 a.m. they sit and discuss the layoffs in the local disc-brake and machining factory of Bosch, the giant German auto-parts manufacturer that is rapidly building up its capacity in China. The company is laying off thousands of workers at its plants throughout the state, it says, to stay competitive. The men lament that there are few places to turn for new jobs. Whirlpool, Clark Equipment, and other once-solid manufacturers used to thrive in the area, but now their factories are shuttered or just shells of their former selves.
• Notice that the Armani emporium on Via Manzoni in Milan, the Italian fashion capital, revises its list of sister stores worldwide to include Shanghai.
• Head for a dim sum lunch in Chinatown and see on the corner a somewhat bewildered young Chinese man, squat, strong, and weathered, looking as though he has come to work the American railroad boom a century too late. He leans on a large bundle, wrapped in a plastic tarp and tied with cellophane ribbon, that probably contains all his worldly goods. He is one of Chinas untold millions of rural migrants, but has somehowperhaps with the help of a smugglerfound his way far past Chinas thriving ports. He will now compete for work on the low rung of Americas domestic economy.
• A contractor shows you the home of a client who has renovated her master bath. Hes replaced a long, old Formica countertop with an expanse of midnight blue marble, as ornately beveled as one might find in a Venetian spa. He sees your eyes widen and recommends the same for you, saying its Italian, its expensive, but its worth it. After you complain about the price, you follow the contractor in his truck to a lumberyard. Inside are giant crates of precut granite for kitchens, bathrooms, and living room mantels. Everything on them is finished and glued. If you can work with one of these tops as is, the contractor tells you, the counter will cost $450, not $8,000. The yards owner comes over. He says buy fast, because the crates only stay in the store a day or two before he sells out. Hes been carrying the counters for a year. A guy from China came by and said he had three quarries where they cut the stone and finished it. I tried it out. Now I cant get enough.