“In China, automotive industry workers are striking for higher pay. In the U.S., auto-industry workers are agreeing to pay cuts — and then their employers are being sold to Chinese companies.” Source: Salon.com
Striking for higher pay isn’t the only thing the Chinese are doing. They are also buying sections of the US auto industry.
Bertel Schmitt at The Truth About Cars writes about Chinese investors buying up Western Auto Parts manufacturers. He says that 70% of China’s $160 billion auto-component makers are foreign companies.
It appears that due to the sick global economy, which hasn’t hit China as hard, many of these foreign auto parts companies are hurting as profits shrivel.
Schmitt says that some deals have already been made as Chinese bought Australian gearbox maker Drivetrain Systems International, a supplier to Ford and Chrysler, and GM sold Nexter to a Beijing Consortium who had government backing.
Similar sales took place in 2009, and today struggling U.S. Firms like Delphi, Lear and Visteon may be up for sale soon.
If Chinese investors buy enough Western auto-parts manufacturers, China may add that industry to solar panel and wind-turbine manufacturing along with the country’s monopoly on refining rare-earth mineral necessary for hi-tech products and weapons systems.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
China already leads the world in high-speed rail, solar power and wind turbine manufacturing.
Now, Spencer Swartz and Shai Oster report in the Wall Street Journal that “China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest energy consumer, according to new data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a milestone that reflects both China’s decades-long burst of economic growth and its rapidly expanding influence as an industrial giant.”
China disagrees with the IEA’s announcement but that doesn’t matter.
Even if China were correct, it wouldn’t be long before China did pass the US in energy consumption since the latest five-year plan is extending the electrical grid into rural China to send electricity to 700 million more people.
In fact, as China modernizes and catches up with the US and Europe, more energy will be required to power all those rural homes. Even if the Chinese do not consume as much as those in the US, that is still a lot of electricity.
This begs an answer for the question the Slate asks with How Communist is China? After all, General Motors sold more cars in China than in the US in the first half of 2010. And let’s not mention the Golden Arches, KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks.
Since China abandoned Maoism and Marxism, the Middle Kingdom has been rewriting the rules for capitalist growth. The irony is that politically, China is ruled by a single political party with an unpopular name in the West—a name that doesn’t fit any longer.
Maybe China’s government should call itself the People’s Collective Party.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
I find it interesting and amusing to read this obsession in the West about China’s labor practices. Most of what I read in the media and comments to Blog posts have a superior tone as if these people come from a culture that is paradigm of virtue.
No one in the West has earned a seat to sainthood. In an Associated Press piece by Elaine Kurtenbach, we see Western corporate greed dripping dollar signs from hungry vampire fangs in these quotes about China, “Many companies are striving to stay profitable by shifting factories to cheaper areas farther inland or to other developing countries, and a few are even resuming production in the West.… I have 15 major clients. My job is to give the best advice I can give. I tell it like it is. I tell them, put your helmet on, it’s going to get ugly,” said Goodwin…”
From BindApple.com comes this statement as if no one else in the world works these hours, “Foxconn and Inventec are two powerful brands that not many of you heard of. When Apple signed a partnership with these manufacturers, the average worker, lived and worked in the factory, doing more than 60 hours of work in a week.”
America and most Western nations are not paradigms of virtue. Labor in the West didn’t get where it is today without a struggle. All one has to do is look at history to discover what it took to earn more for less hours and be treated with “some” respect in the workplace.
If you spend time at the AFL-CIA’s Labor History Timeline in America, you will discover that in 1791, the first labor strike in the building trades took place in Philadelphia demanding a 10-hour workday bill of rights. In 1835, there was a general strike for a 10-hour workday in the same city.
When there was a national uprising of railroad workers in 1877, ten Irish coal miners were hanged in Pennsylvania and later nine more were hanged. Then in 1914, there was the Ludlow Massacre of 13 women and children and 7 men in a Colorado coal miners’ strike. In 1934, during the Great Depression, there was an upsurge in strikes, including a national textile strike, which failed.
Click on the Child Labor Public Education Project and you will learn that “Forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American history.” In fact, “(American) factory owners viewed them (children) as more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike.”
This situation in the US didn’t change until, “Child labor began to decline as the labor and reform movements grew and labor standards in general began improving, increasing the political power of working people and other social reformers to demand legislation regulating child labor.” Even then, it wasn’t until 1938 that child labor laws were enacted to protect America’s children from exploitation.
So, if you are one of those paradigms of virtue who feels the need to criticize what is going on in China today, consider America’s labor history before you open your mouth or finger dance your computer keyboard.
It took more than two-hundred years for the US to reach the place it is today with a standard 40-hour workweek with benefits and overtime pay for many workers, while removing child labor from the workplace.
China didn’t start until 1950, when Mao created laws that made women equal to men. Progress stopped during Mao’sGreat Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, which went on for almost thirty years.
Since 1980, China has had about thirty years to evolve, while in America the income gap between the rich and poor widens as if the US is taking backward steps while union membership shrinks.
In fact, Chinese manufactures may be building plants in the US to take advantage of cheaper labor. After all, Japanese companies like Toyota and Honda have already done that.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Yves at naked capitalism provided a perfect example of Sinophobic comments when writing about doing business in China. In GE CEO Immelt Gets Pissy About China, Obama, I agreed with Yves when he pointed out the hypocrisy of a US corporate executive complaining about how Chinese officialdom is not supportive of GE’s business goals.
However, Yves then quotes “Poorly Made in China: An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production” and selected quotes like “Chinese manufacturers cut corners wherever they can, from product quality to factory equipment and maintenance…” Before you believe everything Yves writes about doing business in China, I suggest you check out what China Law Blog says on the subject.
I have met Westerners doing business in China, and those who are carless get burned and others, who do their homework and know what they are getting into, have few if any complaints. When a careless, lazy deal with a Chinese manufacturer turns sour, a careful examination often shows that the fault lies with the foreigner—not the Chinese. Understanding China’s culture and laws is the key to success.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you are buying electronics or paying for a service in China, you should not expect things to work the same as in your home country.
However, a foreigner’s experience may not be the same, since many Chinese treat foreigners differently than another Chinese, whom they may treat “very” rudely, and if you have a Chinese face, don’t expect to be treated as if you are not Chinese.
A Chinese, American friend visiting China recently had a problem with his Sony laptop. Since he never used the laptop on the Internet in the US, he went without security protection. Then, in the hotel, he decided to use the Sony to check his Yahoo e-mail and to send e-mails, but decided to buy Norton Internet Security first.
My friend sent me this e-mail telling me his story.
“Chinese technicians don’t know how to handle a US laptop. To prevent a virus, I purchased Norton Security Software in Shanghai and had a store person install it.
“First, without asking me, he converted the entire system from English to Chinese, and that’s when things started to get really messed up. The next morning, my son discovered that the supposedly installed Norton Internet Security program wasn’t there! When we went to log onto to the Internet, a warning appeared that said we had ‘no virus protection’ on the Sony, so we had to go back to the store to find out why.
“Then my five-year-old Chinese cell phone stopped working, so I bought a ‘new’ Nokia mobile phone, which is supposed to be a good-name brand. That Nokia cost me 1,600 yuan (about 235 American dollars). Guess what, after 24 hours, the thing quit working.
“When I returned to the story to find out why, I was told I would have to pay another company for a service plan so I could use the phone. The salesperson then turned the original receipt over and pointed at some Chinese that was so small you needed a magnifying glass to read it. It said, ‘The customer has to take the phone to a Nokia check center at People’s Square to have it tested.’ Only with a test result that says, ‘No man-made damage by the purchaser,’ would the store consider an exchange or perhaps a refund.”
This 2008 video is almost 48 minutes long but may be worth your time.
In fact, before you visit China, I recommend you become “very” familiar with the China Law Blog. Contrary to popular Western opinions, China does have laws and courts.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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