作者 Nick Edwards and Chris Buckley 2012年2月20 日 Reuters
【编按】2013年1月9日人民论坛问卷调查中心，评选出「海外看中国年度观点（ TOP 10）」，在人民论坛政论双周刊（总第390期）刊出。依排名次序，分别为：
①新加坡国立大学东亚研究所所长郑永年：
改革不是简单打倒既得利益（ 2012年3月3日21世纪经济报道）
②诺贝尔经济学奖得主约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨
（Joseph Stiglitz）：
中国不是要缩小政府而是转变政府角色（2012年9期《人民论坛》）
③美国阿文德·萨勃拉曼尼亚（Arvind Subramaniam）：
中国是个“早熟的超级力量” ,China a 'precocious' superpower?（business- standard Oct 26, 2011, 00:37 IST）
④香港中文大学政治与公共行政系教授王绍光：
中国为民主制度贡献了一个新的驱动（《社会观察》，2012年第8期）
⑤路透社：
中国农民工掌握扩大内需钥匙（ 2012年2月21日路透社）
⑥美国乔治梅森大学经济学教授Carlos D.Ramirez：
中国的腐败程度被高估了
（2012年10月17日“中国开放新阶段高峰论坛”在清华大学举行。会上，美国乔治梅森大学经济学教授Carlos D.Ramirez就“中国的腐败失去控制了吗：中美两国腐败问题的历史比较” ）
⑦纽约时报专栏作家托马斯·弗里德曼：
中国缺少的不是创新而是信任（2012年09月13日纽约时报）
⑧耶鲁大学金融学教授陈志武：
制度安排造成太多国民收入流入政府（第一财经日报》，2012年3月30日）
⑨澳大利亚Monash大学经济系教授黄有光：
房地产没有大的泡沫（《东方早报》，2012年7月17日）
⑩哈佛大学历史学教授尼尔·弗格森（Niall Ferguson）：
中国面临的最大问题是法治问题（尼尔•弗格森屡次提及这个观点，例如「文明」一书或参考消息网，2012年11月15日)￭
(Reuters) - Liu Tao knows he will never be rich enough to own one of the luxury apartments in Beijing that he has been paid to decorate for more than a decade, but he's saving hard so that in another 10 years he'll have enough for a home with indoor plumbing.
Like many of the 158 million rural migrant workers whose annual pilgrimages to city factories have fuelled China's economic ascent, Liu has seen his pay and living standards rise steadily, but he still isn't the free-spending consumer the country's leaders urgently want him to be.
"I need to save up to take care of the kids and I've got the old people to look after," the 37-year-old father of three told Reuters, standing in the unheated, sparsely furnished main room of his house in Zhoulou village, about an hour's drive from Shangqiu in Henan province, southwest of Beijing.
Liu's main spending constraint is not earning power.
His 3,000-4,000 yuan ($75-635) per month is well above the average migrant pay of 2,049 yuan charted by statistics -- but a permit system (hukou) that denies millions of officially rural residents access to social services in cities where they work.
"If you go to the big cities and you see all the tower blocks and tall buildings, they've been built by migrant laborers, but we don't see any of the benefits. The government needs to make sure more of that wealth is shared with migrant laborers," Liu said.
It's a vital message for a Chinese leadership anxious to turn a nation of savers into spenders and rebalance the world's second biggest economy towards its huge domestic market. That would cut dependence on external demand jolted by financial crises twice in three years, with current trends pointing to the slowest year of economic expansion in a decade.
Stability and steady growth are core to the Communist Party's justification for more than 60 years of one-party rule, making it acutely sensitive to anything that could dislodge it. But the leadership has yet to show the will to grasp a reform that some of its own economic advisers say is crucial.
The 600 million people China has lifted out of rural poverty by 30 years of development remain far from urban affluence. Inequality soars beside skyscrapers and dollar billionaires and IMF data show that consumption as a share of disposable income has plunged 20 percentage points in the last decade.
With city dwellers topping 50 percent of the population for the first time last year, it signals that Beijing cannot unlock the potential of urbanization unless it reforms the hukou system to turn migration into permanent city settlement.
Access to schools, hospitals and other services is allocated by hukou, keeping them out of reach of migrant workers.
"The hukou system is preventing the arrival of the Lewis turning point," said Yukon Huang, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former student of Nobel-prize winning economist, Arthur Lewis, whose theory of economic development is a focus for investors and policymakers.
It postulates that once all excess labor in a developing economy has been absorbed into the workforce, further capital accumulation delivers self-sustaining wage and economic growth.
ELUSIVE SWEET SPOT
It's a sweet spot eluding Beijing, despite having turned its top companies into global leaders in terms of market share and profits, and amassing the largest store of foreign wealth on the planet at $3.18 trillion -- much of it the last 10 years.
Migrants have barely had a sniff of the riches, although they produce most of the economy's value added growth in the 200 million jobs they fill in the externally-focused factory sector.
The 95 million people of Henan province -- roughly the population of G7 members Canada and Britain combined -- generated per capita GDP of $3,600 in 2010 as some of China's most active migrant workers. It was barely a tenth of those G7 counterparts.
Wages have risen -- in double digits for years and by 21.2 percent in 2011, government statistics show. But so has saving.
Savings rates of between 30 and 70 percent were the outer ranges of a straw poll of workers in villages near Shangqiu and outside train and bus stations as people queued to get back to the factories after annual trips home for the Lunar New Year.
China officially has 80 trillion yuan on deposit at banks, with analysts estimating roughly the same amount exists under mattresses, confounding economic orthodoxy that says higher wages in the hands of the poor translate smoothly into spending.
"That's not the way we think," said Zhu Sheng, wrestling with the decision of whether to leave her young son with her parents in the Henan countryside and return to the Beijing telecommunications factory where she has worked for five years. She is reluctant to take much lower paid work locally.
"Migrant workers save a lot, that's true. We have to keep saving because we have to take of the kids and the old folks. I can't say how much I'd need to earn not to have to worry about saving," Zhu said.
"In the countryside we have televisions and washing machines already. I wouldn't want to buy another or just replace them unless I had to."
Zhu used a government rebate scheme to buy a new twin tub washing machine last year, spending about 600 yuan.
Her 2-1/2-year old boy was playing in the machine, watched over by his grandmother, in the courtyard outside the entrance to the open, unheated room in which Zhu was seated -- framed portrait of Mao Zedong, founder of Communist China, on the table beside her, with posters of reformist leader Deng Xiaoping and other leaders since then on the facing wall.
Zhu and many others like her save for housing, education and medical bills in the hope of a brighter future.
TOO WORRIED TO SPEND
Signs of those hopes are on display in the brown wheat and corn fields speckled with grave mounts. The most recent ones are festooned with colored paper models of new homes, cars and household goods -- symbols of the prosperity older farmers can only dream of for their afterlife and that of their children.
Research by the OECD Development Centre concludes that urbanization China-style confers only half the benefits it should -- improving income, but constraining consumption.
Factors like inflation also erode willingness to spend.
While most will readily agree that living standards are higher than they were a decade ago, they are far from well-off and feel the pinch of price rises acutely.
The annual rate of inflation hit a three-year high of 6.5 percent last July, exceeded the government's 4 percent target in every month of last year and was still above it in January 2012.
But that still understates the pain felt by rural residents who spend about 40 percent of household income on food, the average price of which rose by 11.8 percent in 2011.
Lorry driver Chen Qingguo estimates that it costs about 10,000 yuan a year to keep his 10-year old daughter fed, clothed, housed and schooled in the village where she and her two-year-old brother are left in the care of grandparents.
Employment contracts providing accommodation and food also inhibit spending. Living in dormitories offers few incentives to acquire goods or spend beyond occasional trips to nearby towns.
"My life's in the factory," said Li Jie, 30, who was heading to a Qingdao tyre factory on the east coast to earn 6,000 yuan a month at production line piece rates and up to 8,000 yuan if he works fast and hard.
Residency rights, or at least access in cities to medical benefits, would be a big help in unlocking migrant savings.
It would magnify the impact of urbanization unfolding across
interior provinces. Analysts at HSBC believe this process will turn China's 31 provinces from the equivalent of poor, Third World countries into places generating wealth like a union of second-tier developed and top-tier developing nations by 2020.
"For sustained growth, the most important source is continuous technological innovation and structural transformation," said World Bank chief economist Justin Lin, who believes China can follow an unprecedented 30 years of 9 percent-plus average growth with another 20 years at 8 percent.
Failure to pursue further fundamental economic restructuring could see it unravel. Get it right and China could grow and create jobs almost regardless of the external environment.
Foreign-funded firms employ about 40 million directly, while economists reckon that China creates about 10,500 jobs for every $100 million of goods it exports.
Total exports of $1.9 trillion in 2011 imply 200 million workers owed their livelihoods to foreign demand, about a quarter of all the people employed in China.
Without reform, that dependence will remain unbroken and the
rate of development will merely absorb the influx from the countryside. In 2011, some 21 million people -- roughly the population of Australia -- become urban wage-earners.
ECONOMIC WILDCARD
But that dynamic is the wildcard that some investors believe will keep growth ticking. It is already creating shortages of workers and raising wages outside major manufacturing towns.
As China accelerates development inland, closer to the homes of many migrants, it may be possible for them to find jobs in districts where they are officially registered.
In Shangqiu -- capital of China's Shang Dynasty in the second millennium BC -- recruitment agency worker Chen Xiaowei has seen no sign of a slowdown in demand for experienced staff.
"There's going to be a shortage of workers here again this year. People still prefer to work elsewhere for better pay, but the government is still attracting businesses here too. So the shortfall of workers is going to grow and that means the pay gap is going to have to close," he said.
"Things have already changed in recent years. We're catching up with the more prosperous parts of Henan, but we're not there yet."
路透社：中国农民工掌握扩大内需钥匙
对于中国领导人而言，他们迫切希望扩大中国的内需，使中国经济的重心向国内市场转移。外电认为，中国两亿多农民工储蓄的释放将增强对内陆省份城市化进程的影响，并成为扩大内需的钥匙。
在北京干了十多年装修的刘涛（音）明白，他装修的那些高档公寓是他永远也买不起的。不过他正在努力攒钱，争取在十年内能够买上一套拥有抽水马桶的房子。
文章说，与两亿农民工中的许多人一样，刘涛的收入和生活水平虽然有了稳步提高，但他仍然不是那种可以随心所欲花钱的消费者。37岁的他在河南老家对记者说：“我需要攒钱养孩子，还有老人要照顾。”
刘涛每月能挣三四千元，远远高于2049元的农民工平均水平，但户口制度的存在使得数以百万计的农村居民无法在他们就业的城市获得社会服务。刘涛说：“你去大城市看看，那里所有的高楼大厦都是农民工盖的，但我们得不到任何好处，政府需要确保让农民工分享到更多的财富。”
对于中国领导人而言，这是一个关键的信息，他们迫切希望扩大中国的内需，使中国经济的重心向国内市场转移。这将减少中国经济对外部需求的依赖——在过去三年里，外部需求受到了金融危机的两次冲击——中国目前的经济增长趋势表明，今年或许是十年来中国经济增速最慢的一年。
朱晟（音）正在考虑她是否要把年幼的儿子留给河南农村老家的父母，自己返回北京打工。她说：“农民工确实很能攒钱，我们必须攒钱，因为我们上有老、下有小，究竟挣多少才不用担心攒钱问题，我说不好。”和许多与她情况类似的人一样，朱晟攒钱是为了买房、供孩子上学以及日后看病所需，他们希望能有一个更好的未来。尽管很多人都承认他们的生活水平比十年前好很多，但他们还远远达不到富足的水平，他们对价格上涨非常敏感。
文章称，居住权，至少是在城市享受医疗保障的权利，对释放农民工的储蓄将有很大帮助，这将扩大正在中国内陆省份逐渐显现的城市化进程的影响。汇丰银行的分析师认为，这一进程将在2020年之前，使中国内陆省份从第三世界国家水平发展为二线发达国家或一线发展中国家的水平。
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