中国太阳能产业为何危机频发？

    糟糕的数据简直令人不敢相信自己的眼睛。你可以查阅任何一家中国大型太阳能公司的股票表现，一探究竟（当然，如果你已经非常悲催地成为这些股票的长期持有者，你对这些图表的内容肯定再熟悉不过了）。

    过去一年中，江西赛维（LDK Solar）的股价下跌了80%，尚德电力（Suntech Power Holdings）的股价下跌了87%。包括天合光能（Trina）和英利（Yingli）在内的其他中国知名太阳能企业的股价表现也几乎同样惨不忍睹。

    但这并非故事的全部。让我们回到大约4年前，看看这些股票在那时的交易价格。2008年初，尚德电力的股价一度突破80美元大关。每股80美元！上周早些时候，尚德电力在一次电话会议上宣称被骗取了约5.54亿欧元，进而有可能危及其未来的偿债能力，之后，尚德电力的股价下挫至1美元以下。江西赛维的股价曾经高达每股60美元以上，但现在已沦落至1.39美元。中国在这个所谓“未来之产业”的其他龙头企业的境遇也大致如此。

    这些市值史诗般的崩溃颇具历史意味，而仅仅4年前还盛行于世的一个假设让这一幕显得更加让人难以置信。当时许多人认为，“清洁”能源的时代业已来临。奥巴马总统坚决主张美国动用政府资金创造所谓的“绿色工作”——进而导致加州太阳能电力公司（Solyndra）和其他浪费投资的出现，他的坚持基于这样一个前提：要是美国不这么做，这一未来产业将成为中国人的天下。现在看来，这不啻为莫大的讽刺！在环保游说组织的怂恿下，容易受人摆布的政治媒体完全相信了这种推理。

    4年后的今天，中国太阳能产业已经成为一台不折不扣的资本摧毁机器，一些最知名的公司正在急迫地寻找救生索。7月12日，江西新余市（位于上海西南部415英里处，江西赛维公司总部所在地）政府表示，政府拟动用财政资金偿还赛维公司拖欠华融国际信托有限责任公司（Huarong International Trust Co.）的1.18亿美元贷款。今年5月份，江西赛维在提交给美国证监会（SEC）的一份文件中写道，如果无法改善其融资渠道，该公司或许无力“持续经营下去”。

    The numbers of so awful that you can hardly believe your eyes. Punch up any of the major China based solar energy companies and take a look (unless of course you've been, God help you, a long-term holder of these stocks, in which case you already know all too well what the charts show).

    LDK Solar (LDK), down 80% in the past year, Suntech Power Holdings (STP) down 87%. The numbers for other big Chinese names, Trina and Yingli among them, are almost as bad.

    But don't stop there. Go back four years or so, and look at where these stocks were trading then. For a brief moment at the beginning of 2008, Suntech traded at over $80 a share. Eighty dollarsa share! Earlier this week, after a conference call in which it alleged it had been defrauded to the tune of 554 million euros, possibly threatening its ability to make future debt payments, it dipped under $1.00. LDK Solar once traded at over $60 per share. Now it's $1.39. On and on we could go with all the other alleged Chinese powerhouses in the supposed industry of the future.

    These are epic, historic collapses in market valuation, made all the more stunning by the assumption, so prevalent just four years ago, that "clean" energy's time had come. How ironic it is that Barack Obama's insistence that the United States invest government money into the creation of so called "green jobs" -- which led to the debacle of Solyndra and other wasted investments -- was predicated on the fact that if the U.S. didn't do so, the industry of the future would be Made in China. A credulous political press, egged on by the environmental lobby, swallowed the reasoning wholesale.

    So now we sit, four years later, and China's solar energy industry has become nothing less than a capital destruction machine, with some of its most prominent companies now desperately flailing for lifelines. On July 12, the municipal government in Xinyu, a town in Jiangxi province, 415 miles southwest of Shanghai, where LDK has its headquarters, said it would cover the $118 million debt it owes a Chinese bank, the Huarong International Trust Co. In May, LDK said in an SEC filing that if it couldn't improve its access to funds it might be unable to remain a "going concern."