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《纽约时报》专栏作家弗里德曼：美国还没醒时，中国已在所有高科技制造业取得巨大飞跃
熊超然 2024-12-18 观察者网
【文/观察者网 熊超然】“我刚刚在北京和上海待了一周，会见了中国官员、经济学家和企业家，我开门见山地说吧，当我们还在沉睡时，中国在所有高科技制造业方面都取得了巨大的飞跃。”当地时间12月17日，《纽约时报》知名专栏作家托马斯·弗里德曼（Thomas Friedman）在该报发表了一篇长篇评论文章，记录了他近期中国之行的所见所得和所思所想。
回到美国后，弗里德曼特别希望告诉即将上台执政的特朗普，正是在中国社交媒体上被戏称为“川建国”的他，过去极尽抨击中国和加征关税之能事，促使中国加倍奋起，在电动汽车、机器人和稀有材料等诸多领域取得全球霸主地位，并尽可能实现独立于美国的决心。
过去8年里，中国先进的制造业实力在规模、成熟度和数量上都出现了爆炸式增长，重返白宫的特朗普会发现，如今他将遇到的中国，是一个更加强大的“出口引擎”——就像吃菠菜的大力水手那样强壮。正是中国的这种强大，让弗里德曼认为，特朗普挥舞的“关税大棒”并不会奏效，反而会激起中国的反制，到那时美国产业的关键物资供应甚至会被切断。
弗里德曼在中国时发现，一些中方专家也都希望中美关系缓和，中国仍然需要美国市场来出口其产品，但也不会任人摆布。因此，如果中美能达成一项协议，双方都采取很久以前就应该采取的行动，那么中美都将受益匪浅。
这篇文章的标题叫做“如何用埃隆·马斯克和泰勒·斯威夫特缓和中美关系”，作者“新颖地”提出，美国需要抓紧时间培育更多马斯克，即能够制造大型产品的本土制造商，以增加出口并减少进口；中国则需要在这段时间让更多的斯威夫特涌现，即为年轻人提供更多机会去消费国外娱乐产品，同时生产和提供更多商品和服务。
然而遗憾的是，在弗里德曼看似倡导“中美合作共赢”的文章里，还是出现了“竞争”、“零和博弈”等观念，似乎暴露了他的真正立场——“但如果我们不利用这段时间，像当年应对苏联1957年发射世界上第一颗人造卫星“斯普特尼克”（Sputnik）那样，用我们自己全面的科学、创新和工业攻势来回应中国，那么完蛋的将是我们。”
托马斯·弗里德曼 资料图
文章中，对于中国制造业的强大之处，弗里德曼作了许多论述，其中提到，从事制造业写作研究的诺亚·史密斯（Noah Smith），前几天援引联合国工业发展组织（UNIDO）的数据，发布了这样一段内容：
“2000年，美国及其在亚洲、欧洲和拉丁美洲的盟友占全球工业生产的绝大多数，而中国即使在经历了二十年的快速增长后，也仅占6%。”史密斯写道：“联合国机构预测，到2030年，中国将占全球制造业的45%，仅凭一国之力就能与美国及其所有盟友匹敌或超越他们。”
“在世界史上，单一国家在制造业占据主导地位的情况只出现过两次——一次是英国在工业革命之初，一次是美国在二战之后。”史密斯写道：“这意味着在一场旷日持久的生产战争中，全世界联合起来也不一定能打败中国。”
弗里德曼随后也举了几个例子，比如：2019年，当特朗普即将结束其上一个执政任期时，中国银行业对国内产业的净贷款额为830亿美元。而据中国人民银行统计，去年这一数字激增到6700亿美元。
2019年，弗里德曼在新冠疫情暴发前访问中国时，小米和华为还仅仅是中国的智能手机公司。而当他几周前再度访华时，这两家企业都已经成为了电动汽车公司——各自利用自己的电池技术制造出了非常炫酷的电动汽车。而比亚迪这样的车企也加倍下注，其推出的电动汽车车型海鸥（Seagull）起售价不到1万美元，物美价廉。
随着电动汽车产业的飞速发展，为了出口庞大的汽车库存，中国又打造了由170艘船只组成的船队，每次可以跨洋运送数千辆汽车。在新冠疫情暴发前，全球造船厂每年仅能交付4艘这样的船舶。而当中国遍地安装汽车充电桩时，苹果公司15年的“造车梦”已然夭折……
弗里德曼表示，就当世界各地将逐渐转向中国制造的自动驾驶电动汽车时，特朗普还在声称要加倍投资高油耗汽车，终结美国人购买电动汽车的补贴。如果真的是这样，美国终有一天会发现，中国将拥有全球电动汽车市场，也将拥有未来——因为自动驾驶汽车市场也是如此。
2024年4月25日，江苏连云港港东方港务分公司码头，滚装轮正在装载新能源汽车出口。 IC Photo
为了减少贸易逆差、让更多企业在美国本土建厂、促进当地就业，特朗普不断动用“关税威胁”，但弗里德曼提醒，他在2025年所面对的中国，已经同他在上一个任期时看到的不同。
此次访华期间，弗里德曼学到了一个新词——“黑灯工厂”（dark factory）。从钢板、手机到家用电器和火箭点火装置部件，中国越来越多的业务领域正在使用人工智能推动生产，并引入了具有24小时不间断、无人值守生产能力的“黑灯工厂”。“黑灯工厂”，也被称为智能工厂，完全由编程机器人运行，无需点灯照明。
“还记得那个古早的玩笑吗？现代工厂只需要一人一狗。狗负责阻止人碰机器，而人则负责喂狗。这在中国可不是玩笑。”
除此之外，驱动中国飞速发展的，还有效率快速、创新能力强、善于学习等等这些因素。近年来，江苏青昀新材料有限公司同杜邦（Dupont）等跨国企业处于竞争态势，这家中国材料科学公司的创始人兼董事长陈博屹就表示，外国竞争对手升级产品的速度要慢得多，而像他这样年轻创业者，从众多中国互联网巨头那里学到的是“快速创新和改进”。
“我们每30天就会升级一些产品。我们可以在六个月内生产出一条新的生产线。我们从埃隆·马斯克和史蒂夫·乔布斯那里学到了很多。你们非常擅长将产品从‘0到1’（从无到有），而我们擅长的是将产品‘从2到100’。”
文章后半段，弗里德曼这样写道：“因此，中国会打败我们吗？这绝非不可避免的。”一如他在文章标题中所写，提到了马斯克和斯威夫特这两位美国名人。“总而言之，美国需要收紧政策，而中国则需要放宽政策。”
他表示，自己对马斯克在X平台上的“大喇叭广播”和讨好特朗普十分厌恶，但去过中国之后，却感染了一种从未想过会感染的“病毒”——“马斯克崇拜症”。马斯克的确是一位天才工程师兼企业家，是一个让中国人既害怕又尊重的美国制造商，而特朗普让他领导“政府效率部”太疯狂了，他本应该领导另一种“政府效率部”，一种让更多美国人能够“做好工程”的政府机构。
而对于中国，弗里德曼则全然不提倡科技、发展、创新等字眼，而是鼓吹“如此不平衡的经济不可持续”，“最终会促使全球贸易联盟形成对抗”。仔细一看才发现，他所提到的内容，和美国此前炒作渲染的论调差不多。
“世界不会允许中国生产一切产品，而只进口大豆和土豆；中国需要更多的护士来为国内提供良好的医疗保健；还要减少为国外设计更多汽车的工程师数量。”弗里德曼甚至还认为，中国消费者对于斯威夫特这样的美国当红歌手也有需求，“这对我们两国都有好处”。
中美关系需要“马斯克+斯威夫特”
How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations
By Thomas L. Friedman Opinion Columnist
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
If no one has told Donald Trump, then I will: His nickname on Chinese social media today is “Chuan Jianguo” — meaning “Trump the (Chinese) Nation Builder” — because of how his relentless China bashing and tariffs during his first term as president lit a fire under Beijing to double down on its efforts to gain global supremacy in electric cars, robots and rare materials, and to become as independent of America’s markets and tools as possible.
“China had its Sputnik moment — his name was Donald Trump,” Jim McGregor, a business consultant who lived in China for 30 years, told me. “He woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort to take their indigenous scientific, innovative and advanced manufacturing skills to a new level.”
The China that Trump will encounter is a much more formidable export engine. Its advanced manufacturing muscles have exploded in size, sophistication and quantity in the last eight years, even while consumption by its people remains puny.
If I were drawing a picture of China’s economy today as a person, it would have an awesome manufacturing upper body — like Popeye, still eating spinach — with consuming legs resembling thin little sticks.China’s export machine is so strong now that only very high tariffs might really slow it down, and China’s response to very high tariffs could be to start cutting off American industries from crucial supplies that are now available almost nowhere else. That kind of supply-chain warfare is not what anyone, anywhere needs.
The Chinese experts I spoke with during my trip two weeks ago would like to avoid that battle. The Chinese still need the U.S. market for their exports. But they will not be pushovers. Both Beijing and Washington will be much better off with a bargain — one that imposes a gradual increase in U.S. tariffs, while both of us do what we needed to do long ago.
What is that? I call it the “Elon Musk-Taylor Swift paradigm.” America would use higher tariffs on China to buy time to lift up more Elon Musks — more homegrown manufacturers who can make big stuff so we can export more to the world and import less. And China would use the time to let in more Taylor Swifts — more opportunities for its youth to spend money on entertainment and consumer goods made abroad, but also to make more goods and offer more services — particularly in health care — that its own people want to buy.
But if we don’t use this time to respond to China the way we did to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, with our own comprehensive scientific, innovative and industrial push, we will be toast.
You have to go to China to see it, but because a U.S. congressional delegation, led by Senator Chuck Schumer in October 2023, was the first official visit by U.S. lawmakers since 2019 — and because many U.S. companies that moved their American staffs out of China for Covid never returned them — a lot of people in Washington have missed the country’s staggering manufacturing growth.Here’s what Noah Smith, who writes about manufacturing, posted the other day, using data from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization:
In 2000, “the United States and its allies in Asia, Europe and Latin America accounted for the overwhelming majority of global industrial production, with China at just 6 percent even after two decades of rapid growth.” By 2030, Smith wrote, the U.N. agency predicts “China will account for 45 percent of all global manufacturing, single-handedly matching or outmatching the U.S. and all of its allies.
“This is a level of manufacturing dominance by a single country seen only twice before in world history — by the U.K. at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and by the U.S. just after World War II.” Smith wrote, “It means that in an extended war of production, there is no guarantee that the entire world united could defeat China alone.”
Let me offer a few examples of the scale of what we’re talking about: In 2019, as Trump was finishing his last term, net lending by Chinese banks to domestic industries was $83 billion. Last year it swelled to $670 billion, according to the People’s Bank of China. That is not a typo.
When I visited China in 2019, before Covid, Xiaomi and Huawei were only Chinese smartphone companies. When I returned a few weeks ago, both were now also electric car companies — each leveraging its battery technologies to make really cool electric cars.
Xiaomi’s SU7, which is manufactured in a formerly abandoned plant that used to make gasoline-fueled cars, was the talk of the Beijing car show last April. Meanwhile, BYD, the famed Chinese battery company, which already had a car-making subsidiary, doubled down on automobiles. I rode all over Shanghai in super-comfortable BYD electric cars operated by Didi, China’s Uber. BYD now offers a subcompact E.V., the Seagull, that starts at less than $10,000.In an effort to export its large inventory of cars, China has begun construction of a fleet of 170 ships capable of carrying several thousand automobiles at a time across the ocean. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the world’s shipyards were delivering only four such vessels a year. That is also not a typo.
Because China has essentially a national electric grid, it has installed charging stations all over the country, which is why more than half of new car sales in China are of E.V.s. Apple talked for 15 years about making an electric car. Has anyone driven an Apple car?
I took the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai. The trip is roughly the distance between New York City and Chicago. Only it takes just 4.5 hours because the train goes over 200 miles per hour and there’s almost 100 of them going back and forth each day. The ride is so smooth, if you put a dime on the ledge next to your window — half on the ledge and half off — it will be there exactly as you left it from the beginning of the trip to the end. Try that on the Acela between New York City and Washington and the dime will be on the floor in two seconds after the train starts wobbling out of the station.
In case you missed the story, while I was in Beijing, General Motors took a write-down of more than $5 billion on the value of its once cutting-edge factory that at one time was a major player in the Chinese car market. Sales at G.M.’s China joint venture, SAIC-GM, “slumped 59 percent in the first 11 months of this year, to 370,989 units, while local new-energy vehicle champion BYD sold more than 10 times that number in the same period,” Reuters reported.
But don’t worry, folks, help is on the way. Trump has vowed to make America great again by doubling down on drill-baby-drill gas guzzlers and ending U.S. government subsidies for Americans who purchase electric cars.So, what do you think is going to happen? The rest of the world will gradually transition to Chinese-made self-driving E.V.s, “and America will become the new Cuba — the place where you visit to see old gas-guzzling cars that you drive yourself,” as Keith Bradsher, the Times Beijing bureau chief and an auto industry specialist, mused to me.
If that happens, one day we’ll wake up and China will own the global electric vehicle market. And since fully autonomous driving technology only really works with E.V.s, that means China will own the future — the self-driving-cars market as well.
Here’s another way the China that Trump will face in 2025 looks a lot different from his last go-round. If Trump were even to tell China, “Hey, I’ll let you off the hook on tariffs, if you build more factories in America,” that would definitely help reduce our trade deficit with Beijing, but it might not be such a vote-getter for Republicans. Because here is what China would say: “Sure, how many factories would you like? Forty? Fifty? But there’s one thing. The assembly lines will all be staffed by robots, and we can even operate them remotely.”
I learned a new term on this visit: “dark factory.” A retired Chinese official mentioned to me in passing over dinner that she wanted to buy a new high-tech bed and decided to go see the offerings at the factory. When she arrived, though, she found it was a “dark factory” — so the lights were turned on just for her. It wasn’t dark because it was out of business, she told me. It was dark because it was so fully roboticized that the company doesn’t waste electricity keeping the lights on for any humans — except for the engineers who come to clean or adjust the machines once a day.
As an article in the state-run China Daily explained: “From steel plates and mobile phones to household motors and rocket ignition device parts, more business lines in China are using artificial intelligence to power their production and have introduced ‘dark factories’ with their 24-hour uninterrupted and unattended production capabilities. Dark factories, also called smart factories, are entirely run by programmed robots with no need for lighting.”You remember the old joke? “The modern factory will be just a man and a dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the machines and the man will be there to feed the dog.” That is not a joke in China.
More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel. I love this account from a German travel vlogger from his Shanghai hotel experience, recounted recently by Global Times: “‘OK, so the phone is ringing. That means the robot is here,’ he said at the beginning of the video. When he opened the door, he saw a robot standing there waiting for him. When he pressed the ‘open’ button on the machine, the lid on the top opened to reveal the food he had ordered inside. He took out the package and hit ‘finished’ to close the compartment and watched the robot return to the elevator.”
No tip required.
But there is another reason for China’s headlong rush to robotization: demographic necessity. In America, strong trade unions and a growing population make robots the natural enemy of working people, because of how they supplant blue-collar labor. China’s population collapse and its heavy restrictions on trade unions make introducing more and more robots to factory floors both economically essential and politically easier (but China, too, will most likely face a backlash from its blue-collar workers).
In the last seven years alone, the number of babies born in China fell from 18 million to nine million. The latest projection is that China’s current population of 1.4 billion will decline by 100 million by 2050 and possibly by 700 million by the end of the century. To preserve its own standard of living and be able to take care of all its old people, with a steadily shrinking working population, China will drive the robotization of everything for itself — and the rest of the world.
In his first term, Trump — and Biden, too — was right to impose tariffs on China as long as it didn’t give us reciprocal access. China has consistently violated World Trade Organization trade rules to avoid giving reciprocal access to its major trading partners, and it has greatly subsidized its companies. I have complained about this for years. China has historically bought $1 from America for every $4 America bought from China; much of that is soybeans and other agricultural products.But here’s what’s scary: We no longer make that many things China wants to buy. It can do almost everything at least cheaper and often better.
Eric Chen is the founder of Kingwills, a Chinese materials science company that competes with, among others, DuPont. He explained to me that what young Chinese entrepreneurs like himself learned from the Chinese internet giants like Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba was “rapid innovation and improvement.” His foreign competitors, said Chen, upgrade their products much more slowly and, when they do, can take five or six years to build a new factory.
“We upgrade some products every 30 days. We can produce a new production line in six months. We learned from Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. You are really good” at taking products “from zero to 1. We are good at going from 2 to 100.”
This is possible because the steady buildup of manufacturing capacity in China means that virtually anything you need today — from a tiny part to a rare earth chemical — can be sourced domestically. No other country in the world has such a complete homegrown ecosystem, Chen explained, so any idea you come up with, “you can do all the sourcing from here. We have a three-year target to have zero labor for production and storage using a combination of robots and A.I.” Then “we can sit in China and control production outside of China. Then we can put factories closer to the customer.”
He added one warning, though: “Probably in the future the competition for the U.S. is not China, but A.I. It is coming for both of us.”Foreign business executives operating in China will tell you that you used to have to be there to have access to its giant market of consumers. You still have to be there, they say, but today it’s also in order to have access to China’s expanding market of innovators. Get ready for more “designed in China,” not just “made in China.”
We fool ourselves if we believe that China’s growing strength in advanced manufacturing is only from unfair trade practices. It is also because it has lots and lots of people still burning to work, as they say, “9-9-6” — that is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week to make a better life, and because Beijing has invested in world-class infrastructure, and because it deliberately suppresses consumer spending and because it has a seemingly endless supply of students majoring in engineering — and not so many in sports management, sociology and gender studies.
“The Chinese treat education like we treat sports,” said Han Shen Lin, who teaches at N.Y.U. Shanghai.
So, China’s going to bury us? That is not at all inevitable.
I left as impressed with China’s weaknesses as much as with its strengths. I don’t want to see instability in China. It’s important to the world that China continues to be able to give its 1.4 billion people a better life — but it cannot be at the expense of everyone else.
And it is clear to me from being there that, in the relative absence of foreign visitors, a lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world. As a senior White House official said to me, China “freaked out” the rest of the world when it began its “Made in China 2025” agenda — a state-led and -funded industrial policy that aimed to make China the dominant producer in every aspect of advanced manufacturing, from aerospace to material science to machine tools. And it’s not only freaking out more developed manufacturers, like the United States and Germany, but also developing countries like Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia, as they see China dominating overseas and yet still constricting its domestic consumption.China has billions and billions of dollars in domestic savings that could stimulate its economy, but people will spend those savings only if they have confidence in their government and faith in the future. But the government’s bad performance at the end of Covid shook that confidence, and the lack of transparency about China’s future direction has kept savers cautious.
Their reluctance to spend is compounded by youth unemployment stuck over 17 percent, as well as by seeing some cities so starved for cash that raiding parties of tax collectors are sent to track down tax evaders in other provinces. In addition, the persistent housing crisis, born of immense overbuilding, has left many Chinese feeling house-poor. It also doesn’t help confidence to read that China’s third consecutive serving or former defense minister is being investigated for alleged corruption in the People’s Liberation Army.
Most important, the government’s prioritizing of Communist Party ideology and state-owned industries is driving some of China’s most talented private-sector innovators to quietly move their money, families or themselves to Japan, Dubai and Singapore. That is not a good trend for China.
My free advice to my friends in China is that an economy this unbalanced is not sustainable. It will eventually generate a global trade alliance against them. The world will not let China make everything and only import soybeans and potatoes. China needs more nurses to provide good health care at home — and fewer engineers to design more cars for abroad. Its youth need more outlets for creative expression — without having to worry that a song lyric they write could land them in prison. I talked to too many people who feel choked or don’t dare speak their minds. They see the crackdown in Hong Kong. It was not like this 15 years ago. There is a reason so many educated young Chinese now yearn to go abroad.
As for my neighbors in America, I have a confession. I caught a virus in China that I never imagined I’d get: “Elon Musk appreciation.”
I’d become so disgusted with the way Musk had been using his X megaphone to bully defenseless people and fawn over Donald Trump that I just wanted that Elon Musk to shut up and go away. But there is another Elon Musk. The genius engineer-entrepreneur who can make stuff, big stuff — electric cars, reusable rockets and satellite internet systems — as well as anyone in China can, and often better.
Elon Musk at his best, though, is the one American manufacturer the Chinese fear and respect. It is crazy to me that Trump is wasting Musk on the project of shrinking the U.S. bureaucracy — under the acronym DOGE, for the informal “Department of Government Efficiency” — when he should be leading another DOGE, a government office for enabling more Americans to “Do Good Engineering.”
In sum, America needs to tighten up, but China needs to loosen up. Which is why my hat is off to Secretary of State Antony Blinken for showing China the way forward. On April 26, as Blinken was en route to the airport after a visit that included a meeting with China’s president, Xi Jinping, Reuters reported, he popped into the LiPi record store in the Chinese capital’s arts district.
Blinken bought two records — one was an album by the classic Chinese rocker Dou Wei. The other was Taylor Swift’s 2022 record “Midnights.” Swift’s “Lover” album in 2019 had more than one million combined streams, downloads and sales in China within a week of its release — a record for an international artist, the Reuters story noted.
The demand from Chinese consumers is there. I’d say it’s time for China’s leaders to let their people have more of the supply. It would be good for both our countries.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.
