【纽约时报】 培养中国式消费

ON Wednesday, the House of Representatives is set to pass legislation that would allow trade sanctions to be imposed on China as compensation for its supposedly undervalued currency. This vote comes a week after President Obama, in a private meeting with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, was reported to have made it very clear that the United States is, indeed, prepared to take forceful actions if China doesn’t budge on this critical issue. Unfortunately, forcing such a currency realignment would be a blunder of historic proportions.

星期三，众议院将通过对中国强制性贸易制裁的立法方案作为其有可能被低估货币的一种补偿。此次投票是于总统奥巴马与总理温家宝的一次私人会面之后的一个星期进行的，信号非常明确——如果中国不在这个关键问题上做出丝毫让步，美国一定会采取强硬措施。不幸的是，强迫货币重新洗牌是一连串错误的历史性分摊。

In a recent meeting with Mr. Wen in New York, I framed the dispute between our two nations in a very different light. The gist of what I told him is this: The economic tensions between the United States and China arise because of two things we have in common.

最近在纽约的一次见面会上，我以一种新的视角陈述了两个之间的这个争论焦点。我大致是这么和他说的：中美之间的经济紧张关系源于我们身上所共有的两样东西。

First, there is our shared fixation on jobs. In the United States, we continue to struggle with high rates of unemployment and underemployment. In China, policymakers continue to worry about what they term “social stability” — that is, full employment, absorption of surplus rural labor and reduced inequalities consistent with their aspirations for a “harmonious society.”

第一，我们对工作岗位有共同的想法。在美国，我们还在与高失业率和低就业率作斗争。在中国，决策者还在为他们所称之为的”社会稳定”（即于“和谐社会”相一致的理念——高就业率，吸收农村剩余劳动力和减少不平等）而烦恼。

Second, for both China and the United States, there are major imbalances in the percentages of gross domestic product devoted to exports, investment, consumption and savings.

第二，对于中美两国而言，出口、投资、消费和储蓄所占的GDP比重都严重失调。

These joint concerns have resulted in serious tensions that must be resolved. There are, however, two very different potential strategies to address these tensions: a major currency realignment, favored by many in the United States, or structural policies aimed at increasing China’s internal private consumption.

这些共同的麻烦所导致的紧张关系到了不得不解决的地步。但是，解决这些麻烦的手段却是不尽相同的：进行一轮货币大调整是美国国内的绝大多数呼声，旨在增加中国国内个人消费水平的结构性政策则是受到中国的青眯。

The currency fix won’t work. At best, it is a circuitous solution that would address only one of the many pressures shaping the imbalances between our two nations; at worst, it would lead to a trade war, or risk jeopardizing China’s understandable focus on financial and economic stability.

货币调整不会起作用。从最好的方面看，充其量也只是解决两国众多不平衡问题中的一个；从最坏的方面看，它将会导致一场贸易战争，或者使中国关注的金融稳定陷入危地。

Besides, in a highly competitive world, there are no guarantees that currency shifts would be passed through to foreign customers in the form of price adjustments that might narrow trade imbalances. Similar fixes certainly didn’t work for Japan in the late 1980s, and haven’t worked for the United States in recent years. We’ve allowed the dollar to fall 23 percent — in inflation-adjusted terms — from its early 2002 peak, against all of our trading partners; we did this in the hopes that a weaker dollar would stimulate exports and domestic production. Yet America continues to struggle with high unemployment and stagnant wages, and now has trade deficits with 90 countries around the world.

而且，在一个高度竞争的世界里，谁都无法担保货币手段所带给外国消费者的一种价格上的调整能缩小贸易失衡。相似的调整并没用使20世纪80年代末的日本有所好转，最近几年也没给美国带来什么好处。我们可以让美元下滑23％——在通货膨胀调整时期——从早些2002年的顶峰，无视我们所有的贸易伙伴；我们寄希望于一个弱势美元会刺激出口和国内生产。然而，美国仍然陷入低就业率和低薪酬的泥潭中，现在又与世界上90个国家的贸易中惹上赤字。

This latter point underscores the danger in politicizing this debate. Contrary to accepted wisdom, America does not have a bilateral trade problem with China — it has a multilateral trade problem with a broad cross-section of countries.

这后一点指明了把这场争论政治化的危险。有悖于传统智慧，美国并不是仅仅与中国有双边贸易问题——它和许多个国家存在多边贸易问题。

And why do we have these deficits? Because Americans don’t save. Adjusted for depreciation, America’s net national saving rate — the sum of savings by individuals, businesses and the government sector — fell below zero in 2008 and hit -2.3 percent of national income in 2009. This is a truly astonishing development. No leading nation in modern history has ever had such a huge shortfall of saving. And to plug that gap, we’re left to borrow and to attract capital from lenders like China, Japan and Germany, which have surplus savings.

为什么我们有这些赤字呢？因为美国人没有储蓄的习惯。为了弥补其货币贬值，全美的储蓄率——个人、商业、政府部门的储蓄总和在2008年降到零下，在2009年达到全国收入总和的-2.3％。为了塞住这条缝隙，我们不得不借钱，吸引像剩余储蓄的中国、日本和德国等债主国的资金。

If Washington were to restrict trade with China — either by pushing the Chinese currency sharply higher or by imposing sanctions — it would only backfire. China could very well retaliate against American exporters, and buy goods from elsewhere (a worrisome development in what is now America’s third-largest export market). Or it could start to limit its purchase of Treasury securities.

如果华盛顿限制与中国进行贸易往来——或是强迫中国货币大幅升值，或是进行强制性制裁——，这只会引火上身。中国会对美国出口品以牙还牙，再从别的地方购买商品（中国现在是美国第三大出口国）。或者它可能限制购买国库证券。

The United States would then have to turn to some other nation or nations, at a higher cost, to finance our budget deficits and make up for our subpar domestic savings. The result would be an even weaker dollar and increased long-term interest rates. Worse still, as trade was redirected away from China, already hard-pressed American families would be forced to buy products that are noticeably more expensive than Chinese-made imports.

美国因此不得不转向其它国家，以高昂的代价来负担我们低廉的赤字，弥补我们低于平均水平的国内储蓄。结果将早就一个更加疲软的美元，增加长期利率。更糟糕的是，由于贸易已经偏离中国，那些生活在水深火热的美国家庭将被迫购买比中国制造的进口品价格更高昂的商品。

But Washington remains unwilling to address our unprecedented saving gap, and instead tries to duck responsibility by blaming China. Scapegoating may be good politics, but proposing a bilateral fix for a multilateral problem is just bad economics.

但华盛顿仍不愿处理这条空前大的储蓄裂缝，相反，试图让中国来背这个黑锅。代罪羔羊也许不失为一种有用的政治手段，但企图以双边问题解决多边问题是一种愚蠢的经济手段。

China should stay the course with its measured currency reforms, allowing the renminbi to continue to appreciate gradually and steadily over time. Contrary to the inflammatory rhetoric of China’s critics, this is not “manipulation.” It is a reasonable strategy to anchor the renminbi to the world’s reserve currency, the dollar, in an effort to maintain financial stability in an all-too-unstable world.

Nonetheless, China must address its role in fostering global imbalances. For China’s people and its trading partners, consumption has long been the missing link in an otherwise vibrant economy. China’s gross domestic saving rate is 54 percent of national income, the highest in the world for a major economy. But its consumption share of G.D.P. is only about 36 percent, the lowest for a major economy and about half the 70 percent ratio in the United States.

虽然如此，中国必须在全球不平衡问题上处理好自己的角色。对于中国人民和它的贸易伙伴，消费长期是这个生机勃勃的经济体的缺失的一个环节。中国的国内储蓄总量是全国收入的54％，为世界所有经济大国之最高。但消费所占的GDP比重只有区区36％，为世界所有经济大国之最低，是美国70％的一半。

I would therefore urge China to opt for aggressive and immediate pro-consumption structural policies. Stimulating domestic consumer demand would be a far more direct — and potentially a far less destabilizing — way of reducing saving and trade imbalances than a currency realignment would be.

These policies should include an expanded social safety net, with a public retirement program, private pensions and medical and unemployment insurance. China should also provide major support for rural incomes through tax policy and land ownership reform, as well as enhanced initiatives to encourage rural-urban migration. And it should encourage the creation of service-oriented jobs in industries like retail and wholesale trade, domestic transportation, leisure and hospitality.

During our recent meeting, Mr. Wen openly agreed with these three pro-consumption initiatives. My hope is that such measures will be featured prominently in China’s 12th five-year plan, for 2011-2016, because they could provide an important impetus to Chinese employment, personal income and consumer purchasing power.

在我们最近的会晤中，温总理公开支持这三方面的自主消费倡议。我希望这些措施都能落实到中国2011年到2016年的十二五计划中，因为它们可以极大促进中国人就业，个人收入和个人消费水平。

That would be a win-win for China and the broader global economy. After all, the import share of China’s G.D.P. is quite high — 28.5 percent in 2008, a figure that suggests the Chinese are predisposed to buy foreign goods. Any increase in Chinese consumption would therefore offer a potentially powerful opportunity for American-made goods and services.

这将会是中国与全世界经济体的一次双赢。毕竟，进口占中国GDP的比重相当高——2008年是28.5百分号，这一数字表明中国人倾向于购买外国商品。中国人的消费水平提高无疑将会为美国商品和服务业带来一个潜在的极大机会。

China bashers are blind to these critical points. No nation has ever devalued its way to prosperity. A weaker dollar, or the mirror image of a stronger renminbi, would be no exception to that time-honored premise. America’s own economic miracle has long been defined by our ability to meet competitive challenges head on. And a China that starts to consume more would offer us precisely the opportunity we need to rise to that challenge again.

The Chinese leadership must now make the urgent choice about how to best deal with political and economic pressures coming from the United States and others. Congress has opted for the low road of misdirected currency bashing. China should take the high road by providing immediate and long-overdue stimulus to private consumption.

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