Selling China: Foreign Direct Investment during the Reform Era
Selling China: Foreign Direct Investment during the Reform Era
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DOI：
10.2307/4127930
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发表时间：
2004-07
期刊：
影响因子：
4.3
通讯作者：
S. Morgan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
S. Morgan
《卖中国：改革时期的外商直接投资》，黄亚生著。剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2003年版。XX+383pp.140.00澳元(精装本)。在过去的十年里，中国几乎每年都吸引更多的外国直接投资，比美国以外的任何国家都多。最近，中国甚至超过了美国。尽管中国政府官员和各种媒体大肆炒作，但中国的崛起是美国作为外国直接投资目的地吸引力改变的结果，而不是跨国企业或投资者对中国的乐观看法。然而，外商直接投资推动了中国在20世纪90年代的惊人经济增长，支持了越来越复杂的技术和管理技能的转移。中国已成为“世界工厂”，为北美和欧洲的消费者提供多种产品，同时许多中国人也越来越富裕。但这就是事情的全部吗？外商直接投资对中国有利吗？黄对此不敢苟同。他提出了一个看似相反的论点，即吸引外商直接投资的成功证明了中国所在的国内经济出现了深远的系统性失灵。这本书的“核心主张”是，对FDI的惊人吸收源于国家不愿改革死气沉沉的国有企业(SOE)，以允许国内私营企业更快地增长。因此，黄认为，中国企业缺乏竞争力，原因是在获得资本方面对国有部门的偏见，以及高度的市场碎片化，这对国内企业比外商投资企业(FIE)更不利。因此，外国公司向中国提供了中国自己的公司、国有企业和私营公司无法提供的东西。通过这样做，外商直接投资履行了国家一直不愿通过放开对国内企业和金融体系的控制来允许的“私有化功能”：“中国迫切需要外国资本家接管其资不抵债的国有企业，正是因为它不允许本国资本家这样做”(第319页)。黄的研究具有挑衅性和尖锐性，但这本书也存在问题。首先，它包括七个超长的章节，更长的是六个章节的附录，这些附录解决了数据和解释问题。稍加复制就不会误入歧途。引言部分介绍了论文的总体思路，第二章介绍了微观经济学的分析框架。第三章至第五章分析了中国公司制存在的问题--国有企业、乡镇企业、新形式的非国有实体和收费问题。第六章讨论了市场碎片化与外商投资的关系，认为市场碎片化是国有经济的一种表现形式。有人可以补充说，中国是一个大国--经济一体化不会通过简单地将国有部门私有化来解决。第七章是一个很长的结论，它重复了所有的内容，并将论点联系在一起，让那些可能已经与前面几章作了斗争的人明白了。忙碌的读者可以在导言和结论之间跳过正文，而不会有太大的理解或细节损失。我的批评将集中在两个方面。首先，黄对FDI使用的比较数据是不可靠的。他认为，外国投资企业在出口中“无处不在”，外国公司排挤了中国公司(这忽略了一个事实，即中国公司没有出口产品的技术诀窍或品牌，而外国消费者会以今天的规模购买这些产品)。为了支持这样一种观点，即外国公司在对外贸易领域的比例过高，黄将20世纪90年代中期的中国与70年代中期的台湾、韩国和马来西亚进行了比较。这种比较充其量是虚假的。与中国相比，这三个经济体都是非常小的经济体，其中每个经济体的市场力量都很突出或占主导地位--尽管有高度的国家干预或引导。…
Selling China: Foreign Direct Investment during the Reform Era, by Yasheng Huang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xx + 383 pp. A$140.00 (hardcover). Nearly every year for the last decade China has sucked in more foreign direct investment (FDI) than any country other than the United States. Recently, China even surpassed the US. Despite the hoopla among Chinese government officials and various media, China's ascendancy was a product of a change in American attractiveness as a destination for FDI rather than of a rosier view of China on the part of multinational enterprises or investors. Nevertheless, FDI has fuelled China's phenomenal economic growth over the 1990s, supporting the transfer of increasingly sophisticated technology and managerial skills. China has become the "factory to the world", supplying a multitude of products to the consumers of North America and Europe, while many Chinese are increasingly well off. But is that the whole story? Is FDI beneficial to China? Huang begs to differ. He posits the seemingly contrarian thesis that success in attracting FDI is evidence of far-reaching systemic failure in China's domestic economy. The "central claim" of this book is that the phenomenal absorption of FDI stems from the reluctance of the state to reform the moribund state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to allow private domestic firms to grow more rapidly. As a result, Chinese firms are uncompetitive, Huang argues, held back by the bias towards the state sector in access to capital and by high levels of market fragmentation that disadvantage domestic firms more than foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs). The foreign firms accordingly have delivered to China what its own firms, SOE and private alike, cannot. In doing so, FDI fulfils a "privatization function" that the state has been reluctant to allow through liberalization of controls over domestic enterprises and the financial system: "China desperately needs foreign capitalists to take over its insolvent SOEs precisely because it does not allow its own capitalists to do the same" (p. 319). Huang's study is provocative and incisive, but the book has problems. For one thing, it comprises seven overly long chapters, made even longer by six chapter appendices that address data and interpretation issues. A little copyediting would not have gone astray. The introduction sets out the broad sweep of the thesis and Chapter 2 develops the microeconomic analytical framework. Chapters 3-5 analyse the problems of China's corporate sector-the SOEs, township and village enterprises, new forms of non-state entities and the FEEs. Chapter 6 discusses the relationship between market fragmentation and foreign investment, and claims that the fragmentation is a manifestation of state ownership. One could add that China is a big country-economic integration will not be resolved by simply privatizing the state sector. Chapter 7 is a long conclusion that repeats everything and connects the arguments together for those who may have struggled with the earlier chapters. A busy reader could skip the text between the introduction and conclusion without a great loss of comprehension or detail. My criticism will focus on two aspects. First, Huang's use of comparative data for FDI is unsound. He argues that foreign-invested enterprises have a "pervasive presence" in exports and that foreign firms have crowded out Chinese firms (this ignores the fact that Chinese firms do not have the know-how or the brands to export products that foreign consumers would buy on the scale they do today). To support the argument that foreign firms are over-represented in the externally traded sector, Huang compares China in the mid-1990s with Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia in the mid-1970s. The comparison is spurious at best. The three economies are all very small compared with China, and in each of them market forces were prominent or dominant-albeit with a high degree of state intervention or guidance. …