# Hitting China’s Wall/中国模式碰上了大麻烦
[ 美第奇效应 ](javascript:void\(0\);)
__ _ _ _ _
诺奖获得者克鲁格曼2013年的一篇老文，翻译转载如下（英文原文附后）。虽然这篇文章在过去十年中已经被证明非常扯淡，但是仍被某些人奉为圭臬，甚至最近又挖出来，隐掉日期成为唱衰中国的炮弹。
所有的经济数据都应被视为一类特别无聊的科幻小说，但中国的数据甚至比大多数国家的数据都显得更不真实。此外，由于中国政府行事隐秘，媒体受控制，国家规模庞大，与任何其他大型经济体相比，我们更难弄明白中国真实发生的事情。
但现在信号非常明确：中国遇到了大麻烦。我们不是在说发展中的一些小挫折，而是更为根本的问题。中国的整个商业运营方式，以及推动中国经济
30年来迅猛发展的经济体制，都已经达到了极限。你可以说中国模式即将碰壁，而且是像长城那样厚的墙壁，目前唯一的问题是这次碰撞会有多严重。
尽管数据可能并不可靠，但我们还是得从数据说起。当你将中国与几乎任何其他经济体作比较时，除了它的快速增长，马上想到的便是消费与投资的一
边倒。所有成功的经济体都将当前收益中的一部分用于投资，而不是消费，以增强未来的消费能力。但中国的投资似乎只是为了未来能投资更多。无可否认，美国将
70%的国内生产总值(GDP)用于消费，比例偏高，而中国用于消费的比例只有美国的一半，将近50%的GDP都用于投资。
这怎么可能呢？是什么让消费持续这么低，中国人如何保持这么高的投资比例，而不会遇到收益骤减的情况（到目前为止还没有遇到）呢？各种答案引
来激烈争论。但对我来说，最有道理的观点源自经济学家W·阿瑟·刘易斯(W. Arthur
Lewis)提出已久的一个见解。刘易斯认为，处于经济发展早期阶段的国家通常存在一个规模较小的现代化领域，以及一个规模较大的传统领域，而后者包括大
量“剩余劳动力”——未能充分就业的农村劳动力，他们最多只能为经济总产出做出微不足道的贡献。
这种剩余劳动力的存在进而会产生两个影响。第一，在一段时间里，这样的国家能够在新厂房、建设等项目上投入大量资金，而不出现收益递减的情
况，因为它们能不断地从农村地区引进新劳动力。第二，这支剩余劳动后备军竞争激烈，导致工资维持在较低水平，即便中国越来越富。实际上，中国人消费持续低
迷似乎主要是因为，中国家庭从未看到中国经济增长为他们带来太多收益。其中一部分收益流向了有政治背景的精英，但大部分收益还是控制在企业手里，其中很多 都是国企。
按照我们的标准，这一切都极不寻常，但这种模式已经推动发展几十年。但如今，中国已经达到了“刘易斯拐点”(Lewis
point)——简单地说，中国农村剩余劳动力正出现短缺。
这应该是件好事。工资上涨，普通中国人终于开始分享经济发展的成果。但这也意味着，中国经济正突然面临急剧“再平衡”的需求，再平衡已成为当
前的一句术语。投资目前正遇到收益骤减的情况，无论政府做什么，投资都将大幅下滑。消费支出必须大幅提升来取代投资的地位。问题是，消费增加是否够快，足
以避免出现严重的经济滑坡。
越来越明显，答案看来是否定的。这么多年来，再平衡的需求一直非常明显，但中国只是不断推迟进行必要的改革，转而通过促使货币贬值，并提供大
量低息贷款来提振经济发展。（有人会提出这个问题，但是这与美联储[Federal
Reserve]的政策几乎没有相似之处。）这些措施推迟我们正视问题的那一天，但同时也保证了，那一天终于到来的时候，情况会愈加艰难。现在，这一天终 于到了。
这跟其他国家有多大关系？市场价值对于全球经济前景来说至关重要，根据市场价值来计算，中国的经济规模仅比日本的略大，大约是美国及欧盟经济规模的一半大。因此，中国是一个经济大国，但不算很大。在平常时期，对于中国遇到的麻烦，世界或许无须太过紧张。
遗憾的是，现在不是平常时期：中国达到了刘易斯拐点，与此同时，西方经济体正经历它们的“明斯基时刻”(Minsky
moment)，也就是放债过多的私人借贷机构全都试图在同一时间追回贷款，此类行为会导致经济整体衰退。中国的新麻烦是其他国家最不愿意见到的。
毫无疑问，很多读者感到在坐过山车。就在前几天，我们还在畏惧中国人。而现在，我们却替他们担心。但我们的情况也没有改善。
All economic data are best viewed as a peculiarly boring genre of science
fiction, but Chinese data are even more fictional than most. Add a secretive
government, a controlled press, and the sheer size of the country, and it’s
harder to figure out what’s really happening in China than it is in any other
major economy.
Yet the signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We’re not talking
about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The
country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven
three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that
the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is
just how bad the crash will be.
Start with the data, unreliable as they may be. What immediately jumps out at
you when you compare China with almost any other economy, aside from its rapid
growth, is the lopsided balance between consumption and investment. All
successful economies devote part of their current income to investment rather
than consumption, so as to expand their future ability to consume. China,
however, seems to invest only to expand its future ability to invest even
more. America, admittedly on the high side, devotes 70 percent of its gross
domestic product to consumption; for China, the number is only half that high,
while almost half of G.D.P. is invested.
How is that even possible? What keeps consumption so low, and how have the
Chinese been able to invest so much without (until now) running into sharply
diminishing returns? The answers are the subject of intense controversy. The
story that makes the most sense to me, however, rests on an old insight by the
economist W. Arthur Lewis, who argued that countries in the early stages of
economic development typically have a small modern sector alongside a large
traditional sector containing huge amounts of “surplus labor” — underemployed
peasants making at best a marginal contribution to overall economic output.
The existence of this surplus labor, in turn, has two effects. First, for a
while such countries can invest heavily in new factories, construction, and so
on without running into diminishing returns, because they can keep drawing in
new labor from the countryside. Second, competition from this reserve army of
surplus labor keeps wages low even as the economy grows richer. Indeed, the
main thing holding down Chinese consumption seems to be that Chinese families
never see much of the income being generated by the country’s economic growth.
Some of that income flows to a politically connected elite; but much of it
simply stays bottled up in businesses, many of them state-owned enterprises.
Paul Krugman Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
It’s all very peculiar by our standards, but it worked for several decades.
Now, however, China has hit the “Lewis point” — to put it crudely, it’s
running out of surplus peasants.
That should be a good thing. Wages are rising; finally, ordinary Chinese are
starting to share in the fruits of growth. But it also means that the Chinese
economy is suddenly faced with the need for drastic “rebalancing” — the jargon
phrase of the moment. Investment is now running into sharply diminishing
returns and is going to drop drastically no matter what the government does;
consumer spending must rise dramatically to take its place. The question is
whether this can happen fast enough to avoid a nasty slump.
And the answer, increasingly, seems to be no. The need for rebalancing has
been obvious for years, but China just kept putting off the necessary changes,
instead boosting the economy by keeping the currency undervalued and flooding
it with cheap credit. (Since someone is going to raise this issue: no, this
bears very little resemblance to the Federal Reserve’s policies here.) These
measures postponed the day of reckoning, but also ensured that this day would
be even harder when it finally came. And now it has arrived.
How big a deal is this for the rest of us? At market values — which is what
matters for the global outlook — China’s economy is still only modestly bigger
than Japan’s; it’s around half the size of either the U.S. or the European
Union. So it’s big but not huge, and, in ordinary times, the world could
probably take China’s troubles in stride.
Unfortunately, these aren’t ordinary times: China is hitting its Lewis point
at the same time that Western economies are going through their “Minsky
moment,” the point when overextended private borrowers all try to pull back at
the same time, and in so doing provoke a general slump. China’s new woes are
the last thing the rest of us needed.
No doubt many readers are feeling some intellectual whiplash. Just the other
day we were afraid of the Chinese. Now we’re afraid for them. But our
situation has not improved.
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# Hitting China’s Wall/中国模式碰上了大麻烦
[ 美第奇效应 ](javascript:void\(0\);)
__ _ _ _ _
诺奖获得者克鲁格曼2013年的一篇老文，翻译转载如下（英文原文附后）。虽然这篇文章在过去十年中已经被证明非常扯淡，但是仍被某些人奉为圭臬，甚至最近又挖出来，隐掉日期成为唱衰中国的炮弹。
所有的经济数据都应被视为一类特别无聊的科幻小说，但中国的数据甚至比大多数国家的数据都显得更不真实。此外，由于中国政府行事隐秘，媒体受控制，国家规模庞大，与任何其他大型经济体相比，我们更难弄明白中国真实发生的事情。
但现在信号非常明确：中国遇到了大麻烦。我们不是在说发展中的一些小挫折，而是更为根本的问题。中国的整个商业运营方式，以及推动中国经济
30年来迅猛发展的经济体制，都已经达到了极限。你可以说中国模式即将碰壁，而且是像长城那样厚的墙壁，目前唯一的问题是这次碰撞会有多严重。
尽管数据可能并不可靠，但我们还是得从数据说起。当你将中国与几乎任何其他经济体作比较时，除了它的快速增长，马上想到的便是消费与投资的一
边倒。所有成功的经济体都将当前收益中的一部分用于投资，而不是消费，以增强未来的消费能力。但中国的投资似乎只是为了未来能投资更多。无可否认，美国将
70%的国内生产总值(GDP)用于消费，比例偏高，而中国用于消费的比例只有美国的一半，将近50%的GDP都用于投资。
这怎么可能呢？是什么让消费持续这么低，中国人如何保持这么高的投资比例，而不会遇到收益骤减的情况（到目前为止还没有遇到）呢？各种答案引
来激烈争论。但对我来说，最有道理的观点源自经济学家W·阿瑟·刘易斯(W. Arthur
Lewis)提出已久的一个见解。刘易斯认为，处于经济发展早期阶段的国家通常存在一个规模较小的现代化领域，以及一个规模较大的传统领域，而后者包括大
量“剩余劳动力”——未能充分就业的农村劳动力，他们最多只能为经济总产出做出微不足道的贡献。
这种剩余劳动力的存在进而会产生两个影响。第一，在一段时间里，这样的国家能够在新厂房、建设等项目上投入大量资金，而不出现收益递减的情
况，因为它们能不断地从农村地区引进新劳动力。第二，这支剩余劳动后备军竞争激烈，导致工资维持在较低水平，即便中国越来越富。实际上，中国人消费持续低
迷似乎主要是因为，中国家庭从未看到中国经济增长为他们带来太多收益。其中一部分收益流向了有政治背景的精英，但大部分收益还是控制在企业手里，其中很多 都是国企。
按照我们的标准，这一切都极不寻常，但这种模式已经推动发展几十年。但如今，中国已经达到了“刘易斯拐点”(Lewis
point)——简单地说，中国农村剩余劳动力正出现短缺。
这应该是件好事。工资上涨，普通中国人终于开始分享经济发展的成果。但这也意味着，中国经济正突然面临急剧“再平衡”的需求，再平衡已成为当
前的一句术语。投资目前正遇到收益骤减的情况，无论政府做什么，投资都将大幅下滑。消费支出必须大幅提升来取代投资的地位。问题是，消费增加是否够快，足
以避免出现严重的经济滑坡。
越来越明显，答案看来是否定的。这么多年来，再平衡的需求一直非常明显，但中国只是不断推迟进行必要的改革，转而通过促使货币贬值，并提供大
量低息贷款来提振经济发展。（有人会提出这个问题，但是这与美联储[Federal
Reserve]的政策几乎没有相似之处。）这些措施推迟我们正视问题的那一天，但同时也保证了，那一天终于到来的时候，情况会愈加艰难。现在，这一天终 于到了。
这跟其他国家有多大关系？市场价值对于全球经济前景来说至关重要，根据市场价值来计算，中国的经济规模仅比日本的略大，大约是美国及欧盟经济规模的一半大。因此，中国是一个经济大国，但不算很大。在平常时期，对于中国遇到的麻烦，世界或许无须太过紧张。
遗憾的是，现在不是平常时期：中国达到了刘易斯拐点，与此同时，西方经济体正经历它们的“明斯基时刻”(Minsky
moment)，也就是放债过多的私人借贷机构全都试图在同一时间追回贷款，此类行为会导致经济整体衰退。中国的新麻烦是其他国家最不愿意见到的。
毫无疑问，很多读者感到在坐过山车。就在前几天，我们还在畏惧中国人。而现在，我们却替他们担心。但我们的情况也没有改善。
All economic data are best viewed as a peculiarly boring genre of science
fiction, but Chinese data are even more fictional than most. Add a secretive
government, a controlled press, and the sheer size of the country, and it’s
harder to figure out what’s really happening in China than it is in any other
major economy.
Yet the signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We’re not talking
about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The
country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven
three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that
the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is
just how bad the crash will be.
Start with the data, unreliable as they may be. What immediately jumps out at
you when you compare China with almost any other economy, aside from its rapid
growth, is the lopsided balance between consumption and investment. All
successful economies devote part of their current income to investment rather
than consumption, so as to expand their future ability to consume. China,
however, seems to invest only to expand its future ability to invest even
more. America, admittedly on the high side, devotes 70 percent of its gross
domestic product to consumption; for China, the number is only half that high,
while almost half of G.D.P. is invested.
How is that even possible? What keeps consumption so low, and how have the
Chinese been able to invest so much without (until now) running into sharply
diminishing returns? The answers are the subject of intense controversy. The
story that makes the most sense to me, however, rests on an old insight by the
economist W. Arthur Lewis, who argued that countries in the early stages of
economic development typically have a small modern sector alongside a large
traditional sector containing huge amounts of “surplus labor” — underemployed
peasants making at best a marginal contribution to overall economic output.
The existence of this surplus labor, in turn, has two effects. First, for a
while such countries can invest heavily in new factories, construction, and so
on without running into diminishing returns, because they can keep drawing in
new labor from the countryside. Second, competition from this reserve army of
surplus labor keeps wages low even as the economy grows richer. Indeed, the
main thing holding down Chinese consumption seems to be that Chinese families
never see much of the income being generated by the country’s economic growth.
Some of that income flows to a politically connected elite; but much of it
simply stays bottled up in businesses, many of them state-owned enterprises.
Paul Krugman Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
It’s all very peculiar by our standards, but it worked for several decades.
Now, however, China has hit the “Lewis point” — to put it crudely, it’s
running out of surplus peasants.
That should be a good thing. Wages are rising; finally, ordinary Chinese are
starting to share in the fruits of growth. But it also means that the Chinese
economy is suddenly faced with the need for drastic “rebalancing” — the jargon
phrase of the moment. Investment is now running into sharply diminishing
returns and is going to drop drastically no matter what the government does;
consumer spending must rise dramatically to take its place. The question is
whether this can happen fast enough to avoid a nasty slump.
And the answer, increasingly, seems to be no. The need for rebalancing has
been obvious for years, but China just kept putting off the necessary changes,
instead boosting the economy by keeping the currency undervalued and flooding
it with cheap credit. (Since someone is going to raise this issue: no, this
bears very little resemblance to the Federal Reserve’s policies here.) These
measures postponed the day of reckoning, but also ensured that this day would
be even harder when it finally came. And now it has arrived.
How big a deal is this for the rest of us? At market values — which is what
matters for the global outlook — China’s economy is still only modestly bigger
than Japan’s; it’s around half the size of either the U.S. or the European
Union. So it’s big but not huge, and, in ordinary times, the world could
probably take China’s troubles in stride.
Unfortunately, these aren’t ordinary times: China is hitting its Lewis point
at the same time that Western economies are going through their “Minsky
moment,” the point when overextended private borrowers all try to pull back at
the same time, and in so doing provoke a general slump. China’s new woes are
the last thing the rest of us needed.
No doubt many readers are feeling some intellectual whiplash. Just the other
day we were afraid of the Chinese. Now we’re afraid for them. But our
situation has not improved.
预览时标签不可点
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关注该公众号
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****
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