夸大中国经济放缓要不得

    空头卖家和杂志编辑们自然津津乐道这样悲观的前景。问题是，事情远没有那么简单。龙洲经讯（GK Dragonomics Research）驻北京的董事总经理葛艺豪指出，尽管过去十年中国的资本投资规模庞大，但中国的固定资产总量——基础设施、工厂和房屋——相对于其经济规模或总人口并没有那么高。葛艺豪指出，发达国家的资本存量常常是GDP的三倍多一点。中国的资本存量仅为GDP的约两倍半，只相当于日本上世纪60年代末的水平。

    至少未来十年，中国可以，也应当继续进行投资。葛艺豪认为，总体资本支出可能在未来几年将继续保持10-12%的年增长，然后才会放缓，而消费将继续保持每年约8%的增长速度。

    我承认，对于任何一个像我这样过去10年里大部分时间都生活在中国的人来说，这至少有悖直觉。十年来，这个国家简直就是一个大工地。但葛艺豪提醒我们的，则是中国庞大的规模。他认为，中国的急起直追阶段还没有结束。

    中国有巨大的增长空间，许许多多的人需要从偏远农村移居到城市。鉴于此，中国或许有资本抵御愈演愈烈的西方危机。

    译者：早稻米

    This makes for a nice tidy bear case of the sort that short sellers and magazine editors love. The problem is, it's not nearly that simple. Arthur Kroeber, the Beijing based Managing Director of GK Dragonomics Research, points out that despite the mind-bending amount of capital investment that's taken place here over the past ten years, China's total stock of fixed capital --infrastructure, industrial plants and housing -- is still not all that high compared to the size of its economy or its overall population. In the developed world, Kroeber notes, a country's capital stock tends be a bit more than three times the size of GDP. In China, it's about two and a half times its GDP, or about where Japan was in the late 1960s.

    China can, and indeed should, continue to invest for at least another decade. Kroeber believes it's possible that overall capital spending can continue to grow by 10%-12% annually for the next couple of years before decelerating, while consumption growth continues to pickup at around 8% a year.

    I admit that to anyone who has, like me, been here for most of the past decade, this is counterintuitive, to say the least. This country has been nothing but a construction site for that entire period of time. What Kroeber urges us to remember, though, is the sheer scale of China. As manic and as rapid as China's "catch up" phase has been, he argues, it's still not over.

    China's got lots of room to grow, lots of people to move from the countryside into the cities, and given that, it also probably has the wherewithal to withstand the intensifying crisis in the West.