What a joke. China refuses to let it's currancy float on the world market like the US and every other country does. If their currancy was at fair value compared to others they would loose a lot of their unfair pricing advantage. This fact along with very low wages, child labor, numerous human rights violations, and a complete lack of regard for the environment is nothing to brag about.
Aha. If your are really interested in this subject there is an excellent three part technical paper by Henry C K Liu
Go to the main link at
THE WAGES OF NEO-LIBERALISM PART 1: Core contradictions Despite all evidence, the US in particular continues to delude itself that fair exchange rates, especially for the Chinese yuan, would solve economic ills. But Western exchange-rate policies have long been part of the problem; what economies worldwide should be floating is wages, not exchange rates. (Mar 21, '06)
THE WAGES OF NEO-LIBERALISM PART 2: The US-China trade imbalance A rising US trade deficit with China has generated much heat but little light about unfair Chinese trade practices. The real danger to the US economy is that the US sovereign debt rating is now dependent on the soundness of Chinese sovereign debt - in other words, on China's credit rating. (Mar 31, '06)
THE WAGES OF NEO-LIBERALISM PART 3: China's internal debt problem China's fiscal policy has begun a gradual shift from "proactive" to "prudent". Beijing now urgently needs to deal with pressing economic and social problems that have been created by its transition from a socialist planned economy to a "socialist" market economy. One key factor is how to handle the national debt in a system dominated by US dollar hegemony. - Henry C K Liu (May 26, '06)
If China let its currency float, then its investment in the Bush Memorial Deficit would sink like a stone. If the US hopes to keep borrowing like a crack addict with a Platinum American Express card, it's got to keep the lenders happy and that means keeping the dollar artificially up and the yuan artificially low. Otherwise the Chinese will, not being idiots, pull out and the house of cards will collapse, with probably negative implications worldwide.
Well, trying to keep the long-range long-term objective view, for most of history China was the dominant culture on the planet; we've got a somewhat distorted view, being the product of a few hundred years of European supremacy, but it seems the American advantages of vast raw materials including space, and immunity to foreign conflicts due to distance, are not so compelling any more, and I would rather bet that the main story of the future will be Islam slugging it out with China than on the US' continued dominance. Of course, the thing about history is that any damn thing can happen, and often does, so the wild card factor is pretty important.
Multiple factors. As I posted before, the normal growth in an industry includes lots of companies sprouting from older companies; the engineering outfits that came out of Hewlett Packard, or the proliferation of American car companies in the early days of the industry as the Dodge Brothers expanded from providing parts for Fords to making whole cars, for instance.
Next: as you say, the expectation in the US of ever increasing standard of living requires continually dropping of costs and/or increase of wages. The obvious easy answer is foreign labor. If you can't ship the worker to the job (see "illegal immigrants") then you ship the job to the worker.
The last factor is rewards for bad management; good management always has involved preventing either your customers or your suppliers from becoming your competitors. See "eliminating the middleman". But given the now usual short-term periods considered when rewarding management, and the now usual 3-5 year tenure of management before jumping to the next job, there is no penalty for turning a company into a burning wreck for high short term profits and jumping ship before the slow process of sinking is serious. Whereas digging in for the long haul and playing it conservative is, ironically, certain to meet with death both for your career and for your company's stock prices.
And most ironic of all, the driver demanding short term profitability is the big shareholders who have to show immediate profit out of owning company stocks and bonds and move their money around on a daily basis to get it; these shareholders are, of course, to a great degree the big pension and mutual fund companies, which have to keep their shareholders happy by showing big returns so they don't jump ship on a quarterly basis; said shareholders being the workers who are demanding these big returns from their investments because their jobs aren't secure. Which takes us back to square one. The mind boggles.
There is a large population of Muslims living in China since Tang times circa 650 AD. They had generally lived in peace for over 1500 years. Even the 100 million Muslims today pales in comparison to over
1 billion Han Chinese. Most of these Muslims anyway are Han Chinese, not the national minorities who number some 20 millions. In other words China can live with the miniscule separatist movements among her western autonomous regions. They are no threat. Geography alone (vast deserts and mountains) would defeat any non Chinese Islamic threat.the correspondence is not one to one. For example, many Hui Chinese are indistinguishable from Han Chinese except for the fact that they practice Islam. Conversely, Hakka are often thought of as an ethnic group, but they are generally considered to be within the subgroups of the Han ethnicity.
Islam in China From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Great Mosque of Xi'an, China's largest mosqueChina is home to a large population of adherents of Islam. Sources, including the BBC, suggest that there may be as many as 20 million Muslims in China, up to 2 percent of the country's 1.3 billion population. Other sources suggest Muslims in China may number up to 40 million, with new rumors saying there are 10 million more hiding.[1]. Many believe there are over 100 million Muslims in China. This is based on the census undertaken by the Kuomintang in the 1940's which placed the figure at
45 million. In addition the China year book of 1950 placed the number at 50 million. The figure of 100 million is derived from the population of China doubling since 1950.The largest of the ten Muslim ethnic groups in China are the Hui. The other nine, in descending order of size, are Uyghur, Kazakh, Dongxiang, Kirghiz, Salar, Tajik, Uzbek, Bonan, and Tatar. Xinjiang has the largest number of Muslims; many are also concentrated in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
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Hui Muslim near courtyard of Daqingzhen SiDuring the Tang Dynasty, China was highly tolerant of new religions and Chinese contact with foreign envoys flourished. Islam was introduced to China via the silk road by Arabs. Although some believe that Islam may have arrived in China during the Sui Dynasty, the first official record of Islam's arrival in China occurred during the Tang Dynasty.
Tang dynasty Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam, sent the first official Muslim envoy to China in 650. The envoy, headed by Sa`d ibn Abi Waqqas, arrived in the Tang capital, Chang'an, in 651 via the overseas route. Huis generally consider this date to be the official founding of Islam in China. The Ancient Record of the Tang Dynasty recorded the historic meeting, where the envoy greeted Emperor Gaozong of Tang China and tried to convert him to Islam. Although the envoy failed to convince the Emperor to embrace Islam, the Emperor allowed the envoy to prosthelyze in China and ordered the establishment of the first Chinese mosque in the capital to show his respect for the religion.
Arab people are first noted in Chinese written records, under the name Da shi in the annals of the Tang dynasty (618-907). Records dating from 713 speak of the arrival of a Da shi ambassador. It is recorded that in 758, a large Muslim settlement in Guangzhou erupted in unrest and fled. The community had constructed a large mosque (Huaisheng Si), destroyed by fire in 1314, and constructed in 1349-51; only ruins of a tower remain from the first building.
During the Tang Dynasty, a steady stream of Arab and Persian traders arrived in China through the silk road and the overseas route through the port of Quanzhou. Not all of the immigrants were Muslims, but many of those who stayed formed the basis of the Chinese Muslim population and the Hui ethnic group. The Persian immigrants introduced polo, their cuisine, their musical instruments, and their knowledge of medicine to China. (more).
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