Our focus is a little different. Yes, we were captivated by the imagery of Mr. Wang’s comment. (Shades of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) But this is the high summer of 2020, and China, the country where the novel coronavirus first showed up, appears now to be among the first to come back to life economically. In the first quarter of this year, China’s GDP growth dipped into negative territory for the first time in 40 years, down 6.8 percent. In the second quarter, growth returned at the modest (for China) but encouraging level of 3.2 percent. Much of that is due to China’s massive program of domestic investments, which Keith Bradsher touched on in a more recent, July 30, 2020, article, where he wrote:
The scope of China’s latest building boom is enormous, and XCMG is playing a pivotal role. Thirty-seven Chinese cities are in the process of building a total of 150 new subway lines, and the company is manufacturing the needed equipment for half of them.
Note the reference to XCMG. Clearly Mr. Bradsher was back in Xuzhou last month and once again talking with the company’s chairman, Wang Min. This time, the take-away (for us at any rate) was not Mr. Wang’s enthusiasm for the Belt and Road Initiative but his competitive goal for the company. Today, XCMG ranks fourth in the league table of construction equipment companies, after Caterpillar, Komatsu of Japan, and John Deere, and, Mr. Bradsher tells us,
[XCMG] is now on the cusp of passing John Deere to become the world’s third-largest manufacturer in the sector, trailing only Caterpillar and Komatsu, its archrival.
But, of course, the number 3 spot is not Mr. Wang’s goal. He wants XCGM to be number one. As he put it:
“It will be my dream and my purpose for my life”
To make XCGM the world leader in construction equipment in the next 15 years.
***
We do not doubt at all the reality of China’s current emphasis on domestic building projects, nor that the Belt and Road Initiative has hit some stumbling blocks. That said, OBOR, BRI – call it what you will – is still very much alive, still shaping the trade patterns of today and tomorrow, and still realigning relationships around the world. Leaving aside for a moment the headlines about Huawei, TikTok, and the tech companies generally, there are a thousands of pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of Chinese construction projects, everything from who makes the bulldozers to who supplies the iron ore, and we expect to touch on some of them in future entries.
As for China’s current construction boom, we are too far removed to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the policy that is driving it. We are, however, struck by the contrast between the U.S. approach of paying people to do nothing and the Chinese apparent insistence that pay is for work. It seems clear to us that, so long as large segments of the U.S. economy are in some phase of lockdown, the country will need mechanisms for getting help to people who cannot pay their bills because they cannot work. But surely that cannot mean severing the connection between work and reward.
It is worth recalling that the last time Americans were out of work on a massive scale we did things differently. In the 1930s, for example, there was the Works Project Administration or WPA. Under it, thousands of people were put to work. What they achieved still surrounds us, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, Camp David, and the Golden Gate Bridge (along with 10,000 other bridges). The mind is drawn back to that era, not because we think the United States needs to reinvent the WPA; we don’t. Yet, if there are two things on which one might be able to find some agreement in the fractious country that is today’s America, they are that:
1. Much of America’s infrastructure is crumbling and desperately needs refurbishing. More than a few new bridges are in order. And
2. Millions of people are out of work who want to work.
Can all of today’s unemployed build bridges? Of course not, but some of them can.
