作者：Daniel Griswold 2011年3月31日CATO institute
去年秋天，美国民主党人拼命想把选民对和中国做生意的不安转化为选举日那天制胜的法宝。然而，虽然美国人对民意调查机构说，他们担心就业机会可能被中国夺走，但绝大多数参与11月投票选举的人并没有上钩。
虽然美中贸易关系很复杂，但从根本上说，它对两国都有好处，出于同样的原因，自二战结束以来，扩大贸易一直符合美国的利益。与中国之间的贸易和与其他地方的贸易一样，扩大了美国公司的市场，让美国消费者可以看到更多竞争与创新，并得到更低的价格，与此同时贸易还推动了和平，也向海外传播了美国的影响力及价值观。所有美国人从中国获益
政客抓住出口问题不放，却忘了所有选民从进口商品中获益。在美国2010年从中国进口的价值3650亿美元的商品中，超过四分之三是改善我们生活和办公条件的消费品。
这些商品对于工人阶级和在沃尔玛购物的家庭来说尤为重要，这些家庭拿出了更大一部分收入，用来购买我们从中国进口的价格适中的非耐用品。芝加哥大学的克里斯蒂安·布罗达和约翰·罗马利斯2008年的一项研究发现，从中国进口的商品让穷人可能购买的商品价格上涨速度放慢。一些政客呼吁对从中国进口的商品征收更高关税，他们其实对准的是穷人和中产阶级的钱袋。
对于美国公司和在这些公司工作的人来说，中国仍然是接纳美国出口商品的发展最快的重要市场。20年前中国市场的规模还处在许多国家的后面，如今中国成了美国出口商品的第三大买家，仅次于加拿大和墨西哥。2010年，美国对中国的出口比上一年大幅增加了30%，增速远远快于对其他地区的出口。大豆和铜是美国对华主要出口商品，不过我们卖给中国的大多是高端制造产品，其中主要是化学品、塑料制品和其他工业机械、电脑、半导体及民用飞机。
向中国出售商品的并不只是《财富》500强企业。我们向中国出口的超过三分之一的商品源自中小企业，这些企业雇用的员工数量都在500人以下。如果在前往中国的飞机上和邻座的人闲聊，可能会发现对方是一名销售代表或主管，来自目前向中国这个迅速扩大的市场销售商品的2.7万家美国中小企业中的一个。
当中国人不用他们赚来的美元购买美国商品时，他们就购买美国政府债券。批评人士认为美国政府欠中国的债务越来越多不是件好事。虽然上万亿的财政赤字很可怕，但这不是中国的错误，而是华盛顿那些挥霍无度的政客的错。根据美联储一项研究，如果我们不从中国、日本和其他净储蓄国那里借这些钱，美国的长期利率几乎可以肯定会走高，我国经济中一些重要的投资机会也会流失。从中国流入的资金刺激了美国经济的发展，同时又没有推高通货膨胀，也没有鼓励次级信贷。
批评美中贸易罔顾事实
批评人士对这些好处视而不见，只知道批评美中贸易让美国失去了就业和安全。
诚然，中国央行严格控制着人民币币值，但其他很多发展中国家的央行也这样做。而且，中国近年来已采取实际步骤，使人民币汇率变得较为灵活，并使人民币兑美元自2005年来逐渐升值大约25%。结合中国国内的通货膨胀情况，人民币的实际汇率已经上升50%。这已经超出了来自纽约州的民主党参议员查尔斯·舒默和来自南卡罗来纳州的共和党参议员林赛·格雷厄姆等人要求的调整幅度———2005年，他们提出议案，威胁对来自中国的所有进口商品征收27.5%的关税。然而，批评人士仍在旧调重弹。
一小部分美国行业和工人在与中国的生产商展开直接竞争，但绝大部分没有。我们从中国进口的多为服装、运动鞋和塑料玩具———在中国成为供应国前很长一段时间内，我们就已从别的国家进口这些商品了。这些行业数十年来一直在减少工作岗位，将生产转移至国外。奥巴马总统2009年9月对中国轮胎征收关税之举表明，试图通过控制从中国进口商品来保留国内的就业机会是徒劳的。为了安抚工会，总统对中国产低端轮胎征收35%关税。来自中国的进口在2010年减少了，但美中贸易全国委员会进行的一项分析发现，这项关税并未推动国内轮胎生产；来自其他低成本生产者的进口轮胎激增。同时，美国国内较廉价品牌的轮胎涨价10%到20%，对低收入的开车者打击最为沉重。
政界人士的注意力集中在我国的巨额对华双边贸易赤字上———2010年为创纪录的2730亿美元。但供应链的复杂和分散使得双边贸易数字几乎没有意义。以iPhone为例。虽然从严格意义上说，它是“中国制造”，但亚洲开发银行研究所最近进行的一项研究发现，在制造一部iPhone所需的179美元成本中，只有6.5美元是为在中国进行组装所花的劳动力支付的。然而，整部iPhone的价格都计算在了美国对华双边贸易赤字中。
中美贸易利于维护和平
中国政府自1978年开始实施的历史性市场改革和贸易自由化是人类历史上最宏大的反贫困计划。世界银行称，在1981年至2005年间，生活在绝对贫困线———定义为每天收入为1.25美元或更少———下的中国人的数量令人震惊地减少了6.28亿，而且预计到2015年，还将减少1.38亿。
随着中产阶级人数的增加，中国不仅成了美国商品和服务的较大市场，而且还为政治和公民自由提供了较为肥沃的土壤。虽然中国仍是一党制国家，但与自1949年中国共产党掌权以来的任何时期相比，中国人民在日常生活方面的活动空间都更大了。每年，有数以百万计的中国人出国。一个受过教育、通晓技术而且拥有一定资产的中产阶层正开始在土地使用和腐败等问题上坚持自己的权利。在商品流动之门打开后，人员和思想的流动也将随之而来。如今，在中国，哈耶克（自由市场资本主义的代表人物———本报注）的著作和圣经正在合法地印刷和销售。
中国问题上的鹰派警告，该国日益增加的财富正在为一台很快将对美国在该地区的影响力构成挑战的军事机器提供资金。事实上，虽然中国军队正变得更为强大，但中国与美国以及中国的邻国之间日益深化的经济联系有助于维护亚太地区的和平。战争不仅会使中国失去民众的生命和财富，还会使之失去重要的市场和投资。如果我们通过某种方式削弱中国的经济成就，很可能会使中央王国更加危险，而不是相反。
通过贸易制裁迫使政权发生变化的做法结果多种多样。例如，在缅甸和古巴那里没有奏效。更有希望的道路是经济改革为政治变化铺路，就像我们在韩国、台湾和智利看到的那样。类似地，我们与中国日益扩大的商业关系正在重新塑造这个国家，以一种在财产权以及自由开放市场在全球逐渐推进(虽然有时步履蹒跚)和不受政府支配的公民社会的发展这一过程中标志着另一个里程碑的方式。(作者凯托学会贸易政策研究中心主任丹尼尔·格里斯沃尔德)
Deal with the Dragon
by Daniel Griswold
Last fall, Democrats tried desperately to turn voters' anxieties about trade with China into a winning issue on Election Day. Yet while Americans tell pollsters they worry about losing jobs to China, a majority who voted in November failed to take the bait.
Across the country, but especially in the industrial heartland, candidates who refused to make China a bogeyman were accused of shipping American jobs and industry to our Communist rival across the Pacific. In one TV ad in Pennsylvania, Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak said his pro-trade Republican opponent, Pat Toomey, "ought to run for Senate in China."
Instead, Toomey and a flock of other pro-trade Republicans are now safely sworn in as members of the new Con gress. Early signs point to a more businessfriendly relationship with China. Republican House leaders announced early in the new Congress that legislation targeting China for its currency policies would not be on the trade agenda. They concluded, wisely, that the U.S. government faces many more urgent challenges.
Although the U.S.-China trade relationship is complex, it is fundamentally beneficial for both countries, for the same reasons that expanding trade has served America's interests throughout the post- WWII period. Trade with China, like trade with the rest of the world, enlarges markets for U.S. companies and blesses American consumers with more competition, innovation, and lower prices, while promoting peace and spreading American influence and values abroad.
Politicians obsess over exports, while forgetting that all their constituents benefit from imports. Of the $365 billion worth of goods Americans imported from China in 2010, more than three quarters were consumer products that make our lives better every day at home and the office. Top imports from China are clothing, shoes, toys, household appliances, computers, and other consumer electronics.
Those goods are especially important to working-class, Walmart-shopping families that spend a higher share of their income on the affordable, non-durable consumer items we import from China. A 2008 University of Chicago study by Christian Broda and John Romalis found that imports from China have slowed the rate of increase in the prices of goods likely to be purchased by the poor. Politicians who call for higher tariffs on imports from China are aiming straight for the pocketbooks of the poor and middle class.
For American companies and their work ers, China remains the fastestgrowing major market for U.S. exports. From somewhere back in the pack 20 years ago, China is now the number-three buyer of U.S. exports, behind only our NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico. Exports to China in 2010 jumped 30 percent from the year before, increasing far faster than exports to the rest of the world. Soybeans and copper are among the top U.S. exports, but most of the things we sell to China are high-end manufactured products, led by chemicals, plastics and other industrial supplies, industrial machinery, computers and semiconductors, and civilian aircraft.
Selling in China is not just a Fortune 500 phenomenon. More than a third of our exports to China are supplied by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) employing 500 or fewer workers. Talk to the people near you on a flight to China and you are likely to meet a sales rep or executive for one of the 27,000 Amer i can SMEs now selling their wares in China's rapidly expanding market.
When the Chinese are not buying U.S. goods with the dollars they earn, they buy U.S. Treasury bills. Critics put a sinister spin on the federal government's growing indebtedness to China, but it's a simple fact that if the U.S. government did not borrow from Chi nese savers, it would need to borrow from some other country. Our own lev el of domestic savings is too low to fund both the yawning fiscal deficit and the investment opportunities created in the private sector.
While trillion-dollar deficits are terrible, they are not China's fault, but that of our profligate politicians in Wash ing ton. If we didn't borrow this money from China, Japan, and other net savers, longterm U.S. interest rates would be almost a full percentage point higher, according to a Federal Reserve study, and critical investment in our economy would be crowded out. The inflow of capital from China stimulates the U.S. economy without stoking inflation or encouraging subprime lending.
Critics dismiss all those benefits by blaming trade with China for costing America jobs and security. On Feb ru a ry 10 more than 100 House members, a quarter of them Republicans, introduced the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act of 2011, which would make it easier to slap anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs on imports from China because of its allegedly undervalued currency. In hyperbole typical of the China debate, cosponsor Jim McDer mott (D., Wash.) said at the bill's unveiling, "It's as though [the Chinese] have a boot on the neck of the working man in this country."
To be sure, China's central bank tightly manages the value of its currency, but so do those of many other developing countries. And China has taken tangible steps in recent years to make its currency more flexible, allowing the renminbi to gradually rise by about 25 percent against the dollar since 2005. When combined with rising inflation within China, the real exchange rate of the renminbi has appreciated by 50 percent. That's more than the adjustment demanded by the likes of Sens. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) when they threatened in a 2005 bill to impose a 27.5 percent tariff on all imports from China. Yet the critics keep chanting the same mantra.
A small slice of U.S. industries and workers compete head to head with producers in China, but the vast majority do not. Much of what we import from China consists of goods like T-shirts, sneakers, and plastic toys — things that we were importing from other countries long before China's rise as a supplier. Those industries have been shedding jobs and shifting production offshore for decades. President Obama's September 2009 tariff on Chinese tires shows the futility of trying to save jobs by curbing Chinese imports. As a sop to his union base, the president imposed a 35 percent duty on low-end tires made in China. Sure enough, imports from China dropped in 2010, but an analysis by the U.S.-China Business Council found that the tariff did not boost domestic tire production; instead, the gap was more than filled by surging imports from other low-cost producers. Meanwhile, domestic prices for cheaper brands of tires rose 10 to 20 percent, hitting low-income drivers the hardest.
Politicians fixate on the big bilateral trade deficit we run with China — a record $273 billion in 2010. But the proliferation of complex supply chains has rendered bilateral trade numbers almost meaningless.
Just look at an iPhone. While it is technically "Made in China," a recent study by the Asian Development Bank Institute found that less than 4 percent of the cost of manufacturing an iPhone represents value added in China. The screen comes from Japan, the processor from Korea, the GPS system from Germany, and memory chips and network components from the United States. Of the $179 it costs to actually make an iPhone, the study found that only $6.50 is spent on the labor to assemble it in China. Yet the full price of the iPhone hardware is counted in our bilateral trade deficit with China.
As with tires and iPhones, the rising tide of imports from China in recent years has not replaced U.S. production so much as imports that used to come from China's neighbors. Since 1990, the share of U.S. imports coming from China has rocketed from 3 to 17 percent, while the share coming from the more developed economies around China, such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, has plummeted from 31 to 13 percent.
Moreover, the historic market reforms and trade liberalization the Chi nese government began in 1978 represent the greatest anti-poverty program in the history of mankind. Between 1981 and 2005, according to the World Bank, the number of people in China living in absolute poverty, defined as an income of $1.25 a day or less, fell by an amazing 628 million, and that number is expected to fall another 138 million by 2015.
As the Chinese middle class expands, it becomes not only a bigger market for U.S. goods and services, but also more fertile soil for political and civil freedoms. Although China remains an oppressive, authoritarian one-party state, the Chinese people have more breathing room to run their daily lives than at any time since the Communist takeover in 1949. Millions of Chinese are traveling abroad each year. An educated, tech-savvy, propertyowning middle class is beginning to assert itself on issues such as land use and corruption. And when doors open to the movement of goods, people and ideas invariably follow. Today Hayek and the Bible are being printed and distributed legally in China.
China hawks warn that the nation's rising wealth is funding a military machine that will soon challenge American influence in the region. In fact, while China's military is growing stronger, the country's deepening economic ties to the United States and to its neighbors are helping to keep the peace in the East Pacific. War would cost China not only blood and treasure, but also vital markets and investment. If we could somehow roll back China's economic gains, it would probably make the Middle Kingdom more dangerous, not less.
The record of forcing regime change through trade sanctions is checkered. It hasn't worked with Burma and Cuba, for example. The more promising path is economic reform paving the way for politi cal change, as we've witnessed in South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile. In similar fashion, our expanding commercial relationship with China is reshaping that nation, in a way that marks another milestone in the gradual, sometimes halting global advance of property rights, free and open markets, and the development of a civil society independent of government domination.
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