时代周刊 中国的下一宗大出口：通胀

62岁的许亚萍（音译，Xu Yaqing）在北京有固定的退休收入，她和丈夫每月可以领到263美元，后来，这对夫妇的月退休金不够用了。在过去几个月，花生油的价格翻了一番，其他主要食品的价格也在暴涨，迫使他们少喝牛奶，用豆腐代替肉。他们并不至于挨饿。但他们很担心。“物价涨了那么多，涨得那么快。”

　　许亚萍以及她的中国同胞的哀歌可能很快就会在全世界回响，而且在西方沃尔玛等大超市响声特别大。那是因为，随着大陆苦于控制其失控的经济，所有来自中国工厂的廉价产品可能开始变得更贵。并非所有经济学家都认为这是不可避免的，但一些人在警告，低价中国产品帮助全世界维持异乎寻常稳定的物价的岁月已经到头了。持这种观点的不仅仅是一些身处荒野的孤独的熊。在新书和最近的报纸采访中，前美国央行主席格林斯潘一直强调中国出口品价格已经开始上涨，这将促进全球通胀的复苏。苏格兰皇家银行的中国战略家辛芬德费尔（Ben Simpfendorfer）则说得很简洁：“在过去十年，中国是通缩势力，在未来十年，它将是通胀势力。”

　　尽管它在当地沃尔玛还并不明显，这些势力可能已经在上演。在过去几年，来自中国以及其他发展迅速的新兴经济体的需求驱使石油及多种其他商品的价格上扬。但真正令许多经济学家担忧的是中国国内突然出现相对高的通胀，而且可以波及海外。尽管中国央行今年五次加息，但该国消费者物价指数（CPI）顽固地上升。在8月，通胀率爬升至6.5%，是超过十年以来的最高点。

　　政府和一些经济学家把这种上涨几乎完全地归咎于肉类和猪肉价格的大幅加价。北京坚称食品成本（中国CPI的三分之一以上）的上升很大程度上是肉类涨价和一次性事件（爆发猪病）的结果，并在9月中旬发放3万吨国家储备的猪肉以稳定物价。

　　但其他成本也在上涨——根据UBS经济学家安德森（Jonathan Anderson）的说法，全国房地产价格的年增长率大约是10%。在8月通胀数据公布以后，政府采取不同寻常的措施，动机所有由国家控制的物价，包括汽油、水和电。意识到高通胀可能煽动社会动荡，官方还警告企业不要欺诈消费者；在8月，当局指责方便面制造商非法串谋哄抬价格。同时，为了减少公众对薪水掉价的焦虑，北京一直鼓励地方政府提高最低工资。

　　后面的措施可能给全球通胀煽风点火。毕竟，正是中国的廉价劳动力让该国称为世界工厂。根据一项估计，在2005年，中国的制造业劳动力成本只是美国的4%，如今随着大陆经济猛进，城市工人的真实工资以双位数增长，政府数据表明，仅在今年第一季度，就上涨的18%。而且原材料价格上涨，制造商面临无法吸收的生产成本上涨。这种成本会转嫁给全世界的消费者，坚挺的中国货币会加剧这种局势。

　　但有经济学家并不同意通胀将不可避免加入中国全球出口名单的说法。花旗银行首席亚太经济学家黄一平（音译，Yiping Huang）指出最近的研究表明，尽管中国的工资增长迅猛，但劳动力生产力增长得更快，这可能抑制制造商提高价格的需要。

　　这并没能安慰中国百姓。许亚萍和她的丈夫仍然担心菜篮子。“如果衣服贵了，我们可以穿旧衣服，但吃的东西无论变得多贵我们也得吃啊。”她非常渴望看到通胀消退。世界其他地方可能也很快心有戚戚焉了。（作者 Austin Ramzy）

China's Next Big Export: Inflation

Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007 By AUSTIN RAMZY

Wal-Mart shoppers, meet Xu Yaqing. She's a 62-year-old retiree who lives on a fixed income in Beijing. Xu and her husband get by on $263 a month, and lately, the couple's monthly pensions haven't been enough. The price of the peanut oil that Xu cooks with has doubled in the past few months, and soaring costs for other staples have forced them to cut back on milk and to substitute bean curd for meat. They're not starving. But they're scared. "Prices are going up so much and so quickly," Xu complains.

Xu's lamentations, and those of her fellow Chinese, may soon be reverberating around the world, and particularly loudly at big-box retailers like Wal-Mart in the West. That's because all those inexpensive exports gushing out of Chinese factories — the $15 sweaters, the $25 sneakers, the sub-$100 DVD players — may start getting pricier as the mainland struggles to bring its runaway economy under control. Not all economists agree it's inevitable, but some are warning that an era during which low-cost Chinese production helped to maintain unusually stable prices for manufactured goods around the world is coming to an end. This view isn't held just by a few lonely bears in the wilderness. In his new book and in recent newspaper interviews, former U.S. central-bank chairman Alan Greenspan has been emphasizing that prices for Chinese exports have started to rise, which will contribute to a revival of global inflation. Ben Simpfendorfer, China strategist for the Royal Bank of Scotland, puts it succinctly: "Where China was a deflationary influence over the last 10 years, it will be an inflationary influence over the next 10 years."

Although it may not be evident at the local Wal-Mart yet, these forces may already be in play. Demand from China, along with other fast-growing emerging economies, has driven up the price of oil and a wide range of other commodities for the past several years. But what's really worrying many economists is the sudden appearance of relatively high inflation within China and the ripples that might cause abroad. Despite five interest-rate increases this year by China's central bank, the country's consumer price index has been stubbornly on the rise. In August, inflation climbed to a 6.5% annual rate, the fastest clip in more than 10 years.

The government and some economists blamed the jump almost entirely on sharply higher prices for meat and poultry, which surged 49% since mid-2006. Beijing maintains that the rise in food costs, which make up more than one-third of China's consumer price index, was largely the result of more expensive livestock feed and a one-off event: an outbreak of a porcine disease that killed 70,000 pigs and prompted the mid-September release of 30,000 tons of pork (about a quarter of the amount of pork China consumes in a day) from a national reserve to help stabilize prices.

But other costs are rising as well — property prices are going up countrywide at an annual rate of about 10%, according to UBS economist Jonathan Anderson — and Beijing's actions speak louder than its soothing words. After the August inflation figures were released, the government took the unusual step of freezing all state-controlled prices, including those for gasoline, water and electricity. Aware of the potential that high rates of inflation have for fomenting social unrest, officials also warned businesses against gouging consumers; in August, authorities accused instant-noodle makers of illegally conspiring to raise prices. Meanwhile, to allay public anxiety about eroding paychecks, Beijing has been encouraging local governments to raise minimum wages, which cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Nanjing have done.

Moves like the latter one could wind up stoking the fires of global inflation. After all, it was China's cheap laborers who turned the country into the world's factory. By one estimate, China's manufacturing unit labor cost was just 4% of that of the U.S. in 2005. Now, as the mainland economy powers ahead — GDP growth jumped by 11.9% in the second quarter — real wages of urban workers have been soaring at double-digit rates, rising 18% in the first half of this year alone, according to the government. Add in higher raw-materials prices, and manufacturers are facing increases in production costs they may no longer be able to absorb. The costs will be passed along to consumers worldwide, a situation that will be made worse by a strengthening Chinese currency. "Internationally, the price of imports from China will come up," says Chen Xingdong, chief China economist for BNP Paribas Securities. "The increase will be inevitable." There's evidence it's already happening. In May, the price of Chinese products imported by the U.S. registered a 0.1% year-on-year increase, the first such gain since the U.S. Department of Labor began tracking Chinese import prices in 2005. Prices have climbed by at least 0.3% each month since then.

If the pattern continues, things could get complicated for central bankers around the world, and for U.S. central-bank chairman Ben Bernanke in particular. Beset by a slowing economy amid the subprime loan meltdown, Bernanke is trying to ease interest rates without triggering higher inflation. Additional inflationary pressure from one of America's largest trading partners will undermine his ability to reduce rates further to prevent the U.S. economy from stalling. He's not likely to get much help from Beijing, which has its own priorities and a limited set of tools to rein in consumer prices. Efforts to cool economic growth by reducing liquidity — China has raised the amount Chinese banks must set aside in reserves seven times this year to curtail the amount of money in circulation — have had little effect so far.

Part of the difficulty for China's central-bank chief, Zhou Xiaochuan, is that the country lacks reliable statistics on which to base economic projections and policies. "They're driving at night without good headlights," says Stephen Green, Shanghai-based economist with Standard Chartered. Another problem is that monetary and fiscal policies are intimately tied up with politics. For example, Chinese President Hu Jintao's centerpiece program of building a "harmonious society" by raising wages and improving state services such as health care for poorer workers plays well with the masses, but may undermine efforts to contain inflation. "As low-income earners enjoy higher incomes they tend to spend money," says Simpfendorfer, the Royal Bank of Scotland economist. "Ultimately that's an inflationary story." Political considerations can also prevent officials from taking aggressive, timely action, says Albert Keidel, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Beijing-based senior economist for the World Bank. "It's better to nip inflation in the bud," Keidel says, "but [politicians'] concern is that if they take it seriously, it shows they haven't managed the economy well. It might open them to criticism from political opposition within the party."

For now, Chinese officials seem to recognize that high economic growth almost always leads to higher inflation rates — and that they can live with that as long as people don't revolt. At the end of September, China's central bank predicted consumer price rises would accelerate from an average 4.6% rate this year to 5% in 2008. Higher food costs continue to be a worry. As Chinese grow richer, they are eating more meat, which pushes up demand for grains such as soy and corn, says Jing Ulrich, head of China equities at JP Morgan in Hong Kong. Although Ulrich expects food prices to stabilize by year's end as the pork supply recovers, she says inflationary pressures resulting from rising meat consumption, the country's shrinking farmland and water shortages will persist.

But does this mean it's inevitable that inflation will join the long list of Chinese global exports? Economists disagree. Yiping Huang, chief Asia Pacific economist for Citibank, notes in a recent research report that, while wages are rising fast in China, labor productivity is increasing even faster, which tends to limit manufacturers' need to raise prices. Standard Chartered economist Gerard Lyons says that China's move into more valuable manufactured goods such as automobiles will in years to come have the same deflationary effects on world markets as the country's push into low-end manufacturing.

That's little consolation to ordinary Chinese. Xu and her husband still have concerns about how to put food on the table. "If clothes are more expensive, we could wear old clothes," Xu says, "but we have to eat no matter how expensive it is." She badly wants to see inflation abate. The rest of the world might soon share that sentiment.

— with reporting by Jodi Xu/Beijing