The $1.4 Trillion Question
The Chinese are subsidizing the American way of life. Are we playing them for suckers—or are they playing us?
By James Fallows
Stephen
Schwarzman may think he has image problems in America. He is the
co-founder and CEO of the Blackstone Group, and he threw himself a $3
million party for his 60th birthday last spring, shortly before making
many hundreds of millions of dollars in his company’s IPO and finding
clever ways to avoid paying taxes. That’s nothing compared with the way
he looks in China. Here, he and his company are surprisingly well known,
thanks to blogs, newspapers, and talk-show references. In America,
Schwarzman’s perceived offense is greed—a sin we readily forgive and
forget. In China, the suspicion is that he has somehow hoodwinked
ordinary Chinese people out of their hard-earned cash.
Atlantic
senior editor Clive Crook weighs in on the private-equity business—why
it's booming, where it's headed, and what it means for American
capitalism.
Last June, China’s Blackstone investment was hailed in the American
press as a sign of canny sophistication. It seemed just the kind of
thing the U.S. government had in mind when it hammered China to use its
new wealth as a “responsible stakeholder” among nations. By putting $3
billion of China’s national savings into the initial public offering of
America’s best-known private-equity firm, the Chinese government allied
itself with a big-time Western firm without raising political fears by
trying to buy operating control (it bought only 8 percent of
Blackstone’s shares, and nonvoting shares at that). The contrast with
the Japanese and Saudis, who in their nouveau-riche phase roused
irritation and envy with their showy purchases of Western brand names
and landmark properties, was plain.
Six months later, it didn’t look so canny, at least not financially.
China’s Blackstone holdings lost, on paper, about $1 billion, during a
time when the composite index of the Shanghai Stock Exchange was
soaring. At two different universities where I’ve spoken recently,
students have pointed out that Schwarzman was a major Republican donor. A
student at Fudan University knew a detail I didn’t: that in 2007
President Bush attended a Republican National Committee fund-raiser at
Schwarzman’s apartment in Manhattan (think what he would have made of
the fact that Schwarzman, who was one year behind Bush at Yale, had been
a fellow member of Skull and Bones). Wasn’t the whole scheme a way to
take money from the Chinese people and give it to the president’s crony?
The Blackstone case is titillating in its personal detail, but it is
also an unusually clear and personalized symptom of a deeper, less
publicized, and potentially much more destructive tension in U.S.–China
relations. It’s not just Stephen Schwarzman’s company that the laobaixing, the ordinary Chinese masses, have been subsidizing. It’s everyone in the United States.
Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world
trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for
their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the
real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going
up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly
parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich)
United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000
from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many
imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and
therefore won’t. But the way it ends—suddenly versus gradually, for
predictable reasons versus during a panic—will make an enormous
difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to
say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.
Any economist will say that Americans have been living
better than they should—which is by definition the case when a nation’s
total consumption is greater than its total production, as America’s now
is. Economists will also point out that, despite the glitter of China’s
big cities and the rise of its billionaire class, China’s people have
been living far worse than they could. That’s what it means when a
nation consumes only half of what it produces, as China does.
Neither government likes to draw attention to this arrangement,
because it has been so convenient on both sides. For China, it has
helped the regime guide development in the way it would like—and keep
the domestic economy’s growth rate from crossing the thin line that
separates “unbelievably fast” from “uncontrollably inflationary.” For
America, it has meant cheaper iPods, lower interest rates, reduced
mortgage payments, a lighter tax burden. But because of political
tensions in both countries, and because of the huge and growing size of
the imbalance, the arrangement now shows signs of cracking apart.
In an article two and a half years ago (“Countdown to a Meltdown,”
July/August 2005), I described an imagined future in which a
real-estate crash and shakiness in the U.S. credit markets led to panic
by Chinese and other foreign investors, with unpleasant effects for
years to come. The real world has recently had inklings of similar
concerns. In the past six months, relative nobodies in China’s
establishment were able to cause brief panics in the foreign-exchange
markets merely by hinting that China might stop supplying so much money
to the United States. In August, an economic researcher named He Fan,
who works at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and did part of his
doctoral research at Harvard, suggested in an op-ed piece in China Daily
that if the U.S. dollar kept collapsing in value, China might move some
of its holdings into stronger currencies. This was presented not as a
threat but as a statement of the obvious, like saying that during a
market panic, lots of people sell. The column quickly provoked alarmist
stories in Europe and America suggesting that China was considering the
“nuclear option”—unloading its dollars.
A few months later, a veteran Communist Party politician named Cheng
Siwei suggested essentially the same thing He Fan had. Cheng, in his
mid-70s, was trained as a chemical engineer and has no official role in
setting Chinese economic policy. But within hours of his speech, a
flurry of trading forced the dollar to what was then its lowest level
against the euro and other currencies. The headline in the South China Morning Post
the next day was: “Officials’ Words Shrivel U.S. Dollar.” Expressing
amazement at the markets’ response, Carl Weinberg, chief economist at
the High Frequency Economics advisory group, said, “This would be kind
of like Congressman Charlie Rangel giving a speech telling the Fed to
hike or cut interest rates.” (Cheng, like Rangel, is known for colorful
comments—but he is less powerful, since Rangel after all chairs the
House Ways and Means Committee.) In the following weeks, phrases like
“run on the dollar” and “collapse of confidence” showed up more and more
frequently in financial newsletters. The nervousness only increased
when someone who does have influence, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, said
last November, “We are worried about how to preserve the value” of
China’s dollar holdings.
When the dollar is strong, the following (good) things happen: the
price of food, fuel, imports, manufactured goods, and just about
everything else (vacations in Europe!) goes down. The value of the stock
market, real estate, and just about all other American assets goes up.
Interest rates go down—for mortgage loans, credit-card debt, and
commercial borrowing. Tax rates can be lower, since foreign lenders hold
down the cost of financing the national debt. The only problem is that
American-made goods become more expensive for foreigners, so the
country’s exports are hurt.
When the dollar is weak, the following (bad) things happen: the price
of food, fuel, imports, and so on (no more vacations in Europe) goes
up. The value of the stock market, real estate, and just about all other
American assets goes down. Interest rates are higher. Tax rates can be
higher, to cover the increased cost of financing the national debt. The
only benefit is that American-made goods become cheaper for foreigners,
which helps create new jobs and can raise the value of export-oriented
American firms (winemakers in California, producers of medical devices
in New England).
The dollar’s value has been high for many years—unnaturally high, in
large part because of the implicit bargain with the Chinese. Living
standards in China, while rising rapidly, have by the same logic been
unnaturally low. To understand why this situation probably can’t go on,
and what might replace it—via a dollar crash or some other event—let’s
consider how this curious balance of power arose and how it works.
Why a poor country has so much money
By 1996, China amassed its first $100 billion in foreign
assets, mainly held in U.S. dollars. (China considers these holdings a
state secret, so all numbers come from analyses by outside experts.) By
2001, that sum doubled to about $200 billion, according to Edwin Truman
of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
Since then, it has increased more than sixfold, by well over a trillion
dollars, and China’s foreign reserves are now the largest in the world.
(In second place is Japan, whose economy is, at official exchange rates,
nearly twice as large as China’s but which has only two-thirds the
foreign assets; the next-largest after that are the United Arab Emirates
and Russia.) China’s U.S. dollar assets probably account for about 70
percent of its foreign holdings, according to the latest analyses by
Brad Setser, a former Treasury Department economist now with the Council
on Foreign Relations; the rest are mainly in euros, plus some yen. Most
of China’s U.S. investments are in conservative, low-yield instruments
like Treasury notes and federal-agency bonds, rather than showier
Blackstone-style bets. Because notes and bonds backed by the U.S.
government are considered the safest investments in the world, they pay
lower interest than corporate bonds, and for the past two years their
annual interest payments of 4 to 5 percent have barely matched the
5-to-6-percent decline in the U.S. dollar’s value versus the RMB.
Americans sometimes debate (though not often) whether in principle it
is good to rely so heavily on money controlled by a foreign government.
The debate has never been more relevant, because America has never
before been so deeply in debt to one country. Meanwhile, the Chinese are
having a debate of their own—about whether the deal makes sense for
them. Certainly China’s officials are aware that their stock purchases
prop up 401(k) values, their money-market holdings keep down American
interest rates, and their bond purchases do the same thing—plus allow
our government to spend money without raising taxes.
“From a distance, this, to say the least, is strange,” Lawrence
Summers, the former treasury secretary and president of Harvard, told me
last year in Shanghai. He was referring to the oddity that a country
with so many of its own needs still unmet would let “this $1 trillion go
to a mature, old, rich place from a young, dynamic place.”
It’s more than strange. Some Chinese people are rich, but China as a
whole is unbelievably short on many of the things that qualify countries
as fully developed. Shanghai has about the same climate as Washington,
D.C.—and its public schools have no heating. (Go to a classroom when
it’s cold, and you’ll see 40 children, all in their winter jackets,
their breath forming clouds in the air.) Beijing is more like Boston. On
winter nights, thousands of people mass along the curbsides of major
thoroughfares, enduring long waits and fighting their way onto
hopelessly overcrowded public buses that then spend hours stuck on
jammed roads. And these are the showcase cities! In rural Gansu
province, I have seen schools where 18 junior-high-school girls share a
single dormitory room, sleeping shoulder to shoulder, sardine-style.
Better schools, more-abundant parks, better health care, cleaner air
and water, better sewers in the cities—you name it, and if it isn’t in
some way connected to the factory-export economy, China hasn’t got it,
or not enough. This is true at the personal level, too. The average cash
income for workers in a big factory is about $160 per month. On the
farm, it’s a small fraction of that. Most people in China feel they are
moving up, but from a very low starting point.
So why is China shipping its money to America? An economist would
describe the oddity by saying that China has by far the highest national
savings in the world. This sounds admirable, but when taken to an
extreme—as in China—it indicates an economy out of sync with the rest of
the world, and one that is deliberately keeping its own people’s living
standards lower than they could be. For comparison, India’s savings
rate is about 25 percent, which in effect means that India’s people
consume 75 percent of what they collectively produce. (Reminder from Ec
101: The savings rate is the net share of national output either
exported or saved and invested for consumption in the future.
Effectively, it’s what your own people produce but don’t use.) For Korea
and Japan, the savings rate is typically from the high 20s to the
mid-30s. Recently, America’s has at times been below zero, which means
that it consumes, via imports, more than it makes.
China’s savings rate is a staggering 50 percent, which is probably
unprecedented in any country in peacetime. This doesn’t mean that the
average family is saving half of its earnings—though the personal
savings rate in China is also very high. Much of China’s national income
is “saved” almost invisibly and kept in the form of foreign assets.
Until now, most Chinese have willingly put up with this, because the
economy has been growing so fast that even a suppressed level of
consumption makes most people richer year by year.
But saying that China has a high savings rate describes the situation
without explaining it. Why should the Communist Party of China
countenance a policy that takes so much wealth from the world’s poor, in
their own country, and gives it to the United States? To add to the
mystery, why should China be content to put so many of its holdings into
dollars, knowing that the dollar is virtually guaranteed to keep losing
value against the RMB? And how long can its people tolerate being
denied so much of their earnings, when they and their country need so
much? The Chinese government did not explicitly set out to tighten the
belt on its population while offering cheap money to American
homeowners. But the fact that it does results directly from explicit
choices it has made—two in particular. Both arise from crucial
controls the government maintains over an economy that in many other
ways has become wide open. The situation may be easiest to explain by
following a U.S. dollar on its journey from a customer’s hand in America
to a factory in China and back again to the T-note auction in the
United States.
The voyage of a dollar
Let’s say you buy an Oral-B electric toothbrush for $30 at a
CVS in the United States. I choose this example because I’ve seen a
factory in China that probably made the toothbrush. Most of that $30
stays in America, with CVS, the distributors, and Oral-B itself.
Eventually $3 or so—an average percentage for small consumer goods—makes
its way back to southern China.
When the factory originally placed its bid for Oral-B’s business, it
stated the price in dollars: X million toothbrushes for Y dollars each.
But the Chinese manufacturer can’t use the dollars directly. It needs
RMB—to pay the workers their 1,200-RMB ($160) monthly salary, to buy
supplies from other factories in China, to pay its taxes. So it takes
the dollars to the local commercial bank—let’s say the Shenzhen
Development Bank. After showing receipts or waybills to prove that it
earned the dollars in genuine trade, not as speculative inflow, the
factory trades them for RMB.
This is where the first controls kick in. In other major countries,
the counterparts to the Shenzhen Development Bank can decide for
themselves what to do with the dollars they take in. Trade them for
euros or yen on the foreign-exchange market? Invest them directly in
America? Issue dollar loans? Whatever they think will bring the highest
return. But under China’s “surrender requirements,” Chinese banks can’t
do those things. They must treat the dollars, in effect, as contraband,
and turn most or all of them (instructions vary from time to time) over
to China’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank, the People’s Bank of
China, for RMB at whatever is the official rate of exchange.
With thousands of transactions per day, the dollars pile up like
crazy at the PBOC. More precisely, by more than a billion dollars per
day. They pile up even faster than the trade surplus with America would
indicate, because customers in many other countries settle their
accounts in dollars, too.
The PBOC must do something with that money, and current Chinese
doctrine allows it only one option: to give the dollars to another arm
of the central government, the State Administration for Foreign
Exchange. It is then SAFE’s
job to figure out where to park the dollars for the best return: so
much in U.S. stocks, so much shifted to euros, and the great majority
left in the boring safety of U.S. Treasury notes.
And thus our dollar comes back home. Spent at CVS, passed to Oral-B,
paid to the factory in southern China, traded for RMB at the Shenzhen
bank, “surrendered” to the PBOC, passed to SAFE
for investment, and then bid at auction for Treasury notes, it is ready
to be reinjected into the U.S. money supply and spent again—ideally on
Chinese-made goods.
At no point did an ordinary Chinese person decide to send so much
money to America. In fact, at no point was most of this money at his or
her disposal at all. These are in effect enforced savings, which are the
result of the two huge and fundamental choices made by the central
government.
One is to dictate the RMB’s value relative to other currencies,
rather than allow it to be set by forces of supply and demand, as are
the values of the dollar, euro, pound, etc. The obvious reason for doing
this is to keep Chinese-made products cheap, so Chinese factories will
stay busy. This is what Americans have in mind when they complain that
the Chinese government is rigging the world currency markets. And there
are numerous less obvious reasons. The very act of managing a currency’s
value may be a more important distorting factor than the exact rate at
which it is set. As for the rate—the subject of much U.S.
lecturing—given the huge difference in living standards between China
and the United States, even a big rise in the RMB’s value would leave
China with a price advantage over manufacturers elsewhere. (If the RMB
doubled against the dollar, a factory worker might go from earning $160
per month to $320—not enough to send many jobs back to America, though
enough to hurt China’s export economy.) Once a government decides to
thwart the market-driven exchange rate of its currency, it must control
countless other aspects of its financial system, through instruments
like surrender requirements and the equally ominous-sounding
“sterilization bonds” (a way of keeping foreign-currency swaps from
creating inflation, as they otherwise could).
These and similar tools are the way China’s government imposes an
unbelievably high savings rate on its people. The result, while very
complicated, is to keep the buying power earned through China’s exports
out of the hands of Chinese consumers as a whole. Individual Chinese
people have certainly gotten their hands on a lot of buying power,
notably the billionaire entrepreneurs who have attracted the world’s
attention (see “Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town,” March 2007). But when
it comes to amassing international reserves, what matters is that China
as a whole spends so little of what it earns, even as some Chinese
people spend a lot.
The other major decision is not to use more money to address China’s
needs directly—by building schools and agricultural research labs,
cleaning up toxic waste, what have you. Both decisions stem from the
central government’s vision of what is necessary to keep China on its
unprecedented path of growth. The government doesn’t want to let the
market set the value of the RMB, because it thinks that would disrupt
the constant growth and the course it has carefully and expensively set
for the factory-export economy. In the short run, it worries that the
RMB’s value against the dollar and the euro would soar, pricing some
factories in “expensive” places such as Shanghai out of business. In the
long run, it views an unstable currency as a nuisance in itself, since
currency fluctuation makes everything about business with the outside
world more complicated. Companies have a harder time predicting overseas
revenues, negotiating contracts, luring foreign investors, or
predicting the costs of fuel, component parts, and other imported goods.
And the government doesn’t want to increase domestic spending
dramatically, because it fears that improving average living conditions
could paradoxically intensify the rich-poor tensions that are China’s
major social problem. The country is already covered with bulldozers,
wrecking balls, and construction cranes, all to keep the manufacturing
machine steaming ahead. Trying to build anything more at the
moment—sewage-treatment plants, for a start, which would mean a better
life for its own people, or smokestack scrubbers and related “clean”
technology, which would start to address the world pollution for which
China is increasingly held responsible—would likely just drive prices
up, intensifying inflation and thus reducing the already minimal
purchasing power of most workers. Food prices have been rising so fast
that they have led to riots. In November, a large Carrefour grocery in
Chongqing offered a limited-time sale of vegetable oil, at 20 percent
(11 RMB, or $1.48) off the normal price per bottle. Three people were
killed and 31 injured in a stampede toward the shelves.
This is the bargain China has made—rather, the one its leaders have
imposed on its people. They’ll keep creating new factory jobs, and thus
reduce China’s own social tensions and create opportunities for its
rural poor. The Chinese will live better year by year, though not as
well as they could. And they’ll be protected from the risk of
potentially catastrophic hyperinflation, which might undo what the
nation’s decades of growth have built. In exchange, the government will
hold much of the nation’s wealth in paper assets in the United States,
thereby preventing a run on the dollar, shoring up relations between
China and America, and sluicing enough cash back into Americans’ hands
to let the spending go on.
What the Chinese hope will happen
The Chinese public is beginning to be aware that its
government is sitting on a lot of money—money not being spent to help
China directly, money not doing so well in Blackstone-style foreign
investments, money invested in the ever-falling U.S. dollar. Chinese
bloggers and press commentators have begun making a connection between
the billions of dollars the country is sending away and the domestic
needs the country has not addressed. There is more and more pressure to
show that the return on foreign investments is worth China’s
sacrifice—and more and more potential backlash against bets that don’t
pay off. (While the Chinese government need not stand for popular
election, it generally tries to reduce sources of popular discontent
when it can.) The public is beginning to behave like the demanding
client of an investment adviser: it wants better returns, with fewer
risks.
This is the challenge facing Lou Jiwei and Gao Xiqing, who will play a
larger role in the U.S. economy than Americans are accustomed to from
foreigners. Lou, a longtime Communist Party official in his late 50s, is
the chairman of the new China Investment Corporation, which is supposed
to find creative ways to increase returns on at least $200 billion of
China’s foreign assets. He is influential within the party but has
little international experience. Thus the financial world’s attention
has turned to Gao Xiqing, who is the CIC’s general manager.
Twenty years ago, after graduating from Duke Law School, Gao was the
first Chinese citizen to pass the New York State Bar Exam. He returned
to China in 1988, after several years as an associate at the New York
law firm Mudge, Rose (Richard Nixon’s old firm) to teach securities law
and help develop China’s newly established stock markets. By local
standards, he is hip. At an economics conference in Beijing in December,
other Chinese speakers wore boxy dark suits. Gao, looking fit in his
mid-50s, wore a tweed jacket and black turtleneck, an Ironman-style
multifunction sports watch on his wrist.
Under Lou and Gao, the CIC started with a bang with Blackstone—the
wrong kind of bang. Now, many people suggest, it may be chastened enough
to take a more careful approach. Indeed, that was the message it sent
late last year, with news that its next round of investments would be in
China’s own banks, to shore up some with credit problems. And it looks
to be studying aggressive but careful ways to manage huge sums. About
the time the CIC was making the Blackstone deal, its leadership and
staff undertook a crash course in modern financial markets. They hired
the international consulting firm McKinsey to prepare confidential
reports about the way they should organize themselves and the investment
principles they should apply. They hired Booz Allen Hamilton to prepare
similar reports, so they could compare the two. Yet another consulting
firm, Towers Perrin, provided advice, especially about staffing and pay.
The CIC leaders commissioned studies of other large state-run
investment funds—in Norway, Singapore, the Gulf States, Alaska—to see
which approaches worked and which didn’t. They were fascinated by the
way America’s richest universities managed their endowments, and ordered
multiple copies of Pioneering Portfolio Management, by David
Swensen, who as Yale’s chief investment officer has guided its endowment
to sustained and rapid growth. Last summer, teams from the CIC made
long study visits to Yale and Duke universities, among others.
Gao Xiqing and other CIC officials have avoided discussing their
plans publicly. “If you tell people ahead of time what you’re going to
do—well, you just can’t operate that way in a market system,” he said at
his Beijing appearance. “What I can say is, we’ll play by the
international rules, and we’ll be responsible investors.” Gao emphasized
several times how much the CIC had to learn: “We’re the new kids on the
block. Because of media attention, there is huge pressure on us—we’re
already under water now.” The words “under water” were in
natural-sounding English, and clearly referred to Blackstone.
Others familiar with the CIC say that its officials are coming to
appreciate the unusual problems they will face. For instance: any
investment group needs to be responsible to outside supervisors, and the
trick for the CIC will be to make itself accountable to Communist Party
leadership without becoming a mere conduit for favored investment
choices by party bosses. How can it attract the best talent? Does it
want to staff up quickly, to match its quickly mounting assets, by
bidding for financial managers on the world market—where many of the
candidates are high-priced, not fluent in Chinese, and reluctant to move
to Beijing? Or can it afford to take the time to home-grow its own
staff?
While the CIC is figuring out its own future, outsiders are trying to figure out the CIC—and also SAFE,
which will continue handling many of China’s assets. As far as anyone
can tell, the starting point for both is risk avoidance. No more
Blackstones. No more CNOOC-Unocals. (In 2005, the Chinese state oil firm
CNOOC attempted to buy U.S.–based Unocal. It withdrew the offer in the
face of intense political opposition to the deal in America.) One person
involved with the CIC said that its officials had seen recent Lou Dobbs
broadcasts criticizing “Communist China” and were “shellshocked” about
the political resentment their investments might encounter in the United
States. For all these reasons the Chinese leadership, as another person
put it, “has a strong preference to follow someone else’s lead, not in
an imitative way” but as an unobtrusive minority partner wherever
possible. It will follow the lead of others for now, that is, while the
CIC takes its first steps as a gigantic international financial
investor.
The latest analyses by Brad Setser suggest that despite all the talk
about abandoning the dollar, China is still putting about as large a
share of its money into dollars as ever, somewhere between 65 and 70
percent of its foreign earnings. “Politically, the last thing they want
is to signal a loss of faith in the dollar,” Andy Rothman, of the
financial firm CLSA, told me; that would lead to a surge in the RMB,
which would hurt Chinese exporters, not to mention the damage it would
cause to China’s vast existing dollar assets.
The problem is that these and other foreign observers must guess at
China’s aims, rather than knowing for sure. As Rothman put it, “The
opaqueness about intentions and goals is always the issue.” The
mini-panics last year took hold precisely because no one could be sure
that SAFE was not about to change course.
The uncertainty arises in part from the limited track record of
China’s new financial leadership. As one American financier pointed out
to me: “The man in charge of the whole thing”—Lou Jiwei—“has never
bought a share of stock, never bought a car, never bought a house.”
Another foreign financier said, after meeting some CIC staffers, “By
Chinese terms, these are very sophisticated people.” But, he went on to
say, in a professional sense none of them had lived through the
financial crises of the last generation: the U.S. market crash of 1987,
the “Asian flu” of the late 1990s, the collapse of the Internet bubble
soon afterward. The Chinese economy was affected by all these upheavals,
but the likes of Gao Xiqing were not fully exposed to their lessons,
sheltered as they were within Chinese institutions.
Foreign observers also suggest that, even after exposure to the Lou
Dobbs clips, the Chinese financial leadership may not yet fully grasp
how suspicious other countries are likely to be of China’s financial
intentions, for reasons both fair and unfair. The unfair reason is
all-purpose nervousness about any new rising power. “They need to
understand, and they don’t, that everything they do will be seen as
political,” a financier with extensive experience in both China and
America told me. “Whatever they buy, whatever they say, whatever they do
will be seen as China Inc.”
The fair reason for concern is, again, the transparency problem.
Twice in the past year, China has in nonfinancial ways demonstrated the
ripples that a nontransparent policy creates. Last January, its military
intentionally shot down one of its own satellites, filling orbital
paths with debris. The exercise greatly alarmed the U.S. military,
because of what seemed to be an implied threat to America’s crucial
space sensors. For several days, the Chinese government said nothing at
all about the test, and nearly a year later, foreign analysts still
debate whether it was a deliberate provocation, the result of a
misunderstanding, or a freelance effort by the military. In November,
China denied a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the Kitty Hawk,
routine permission to dock in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving, even though
many Navy families had gone there for a reunion. In each case, the most
ominous aspect is that outsiders could not really be sure what the
Chinese leadership had in mind. Were these deliberate taunts or shows of
strength? The results of factional feuding within the leadership?
Simple miscalculations? In the absence of clear official explanations no
one really knew, and many assumed the worst.
So it could be with finance, unless China becomes as transparent as
it is rich. Chinese officials say they will move in that direction, but
they’re in no hurry. Last fall, Edwin Truman prepared a good-governance
scorecard for dozens of “sovereign wealth” funds—government-run
investment funds like SAFE
and the CIC. He compared funds from Singapore, Korea, Norway, and
elsewhere, ranking them on governing structure, openness, and similar
qualities. China’s funds ended up in the lower third of his
list—better-run than Iran’s, Sudan’s, or Algeria’s, but worse than
Mexico’s, Russia’s, or Kuwait’s. China received no points in the
“governance” category and half a point out of a possible 12 for
“transparency and accountability.”
Foreigners (ordinary Chinese too, for that matter) can’t be sure
about the mixture of political and strictly economic motives behind
future investment decisions the Chinese might make. When China’s
president, Hu Jintao, visited Seattle two years ago, he announced a
large purchase of Boeing aircraft. When France’s new president, Nicolas
Sarkozy, visited China late last year, Hu announced an even larger
purchase of Airbuses. Every Chinese order for an airplane is a political
as well as commercial decision. Brad Setser says that the Chinese
government probably believed that it would get “credit” for the
Blackstone purchase in whatever negotiations came up next with the
United States, in the same way it would get credit for choosing Boeing.
This is another twist to the Kremlinology of trying to discern China’s
investment strategy.
Where the money goes, other kinds of power follow. Just ask Mikhail
Gorbachev, as he reflects on the role bankruptcy played in bringing down
the Soviet empire. While Japan’s great wealth has not yet made it a
major diplomatic actor, and China has so far shied from, rather than
seized, opportunities to influence events outside its immediate realm,
time and money could change that. China’s military is too weak to
challenge the U.S. directly even in the Taiwan Straits, let alone
anyplace else. That, too, could change.
A Balance of Terror
Let’s take these fears about a rich, strong China to their
logical extreme. The U.S. and Chinese governments are always
disagreeing—about trade, foreign policy, the environment. Someday the
disagreement could be severe. Taiwan, Tibet, North Korea, Iran—the
possibilities are many, though Taiwan always heads the list. Perhaps a
crackdown within China. Perhaps another accident, like the U.S. bombing
of China’s embassy in Belgrade nine years ago, which everyone in China
still believes was intentional and which no prudent American ever
mentions here.
Whatever the provocation, China would consider its levers and weapons
and find one stronger than all the rest—one no other country in the
world can wield. Without China’s billion dollars a day, the United
States could not keep its economy stable or spare the dollar from
collapse.
Would the Chinese use that weapon? The reasonable answer is no,
because they would wound themselves grievously, too. Their years of
national savings are held in the same dollars that would be ruined; in a
panic, they’d get only a small share out before the value fell.
Besides, their factories depend on customers with dollars to spend.
But that “reassuring” answer is actually frightening. Lawrence
Summers calls today’s arrangement “the balance of financial terror,” and
says that it is flawed in the same way that the “mutually assured
destruction” of the Cold War era was. That doctrine held that neither
the United States nor the Soviet Union would dare use its nuclear
weapons against the other, since it would be destroyed in return. With
allowances for hyperbole, something similar applies to the dollar
standoff. China can’t afford to stop feeding dollars to Americans,
because China’s own dollar holdings would be devastated if it did. As
long as that logic holds, the system works. As soon as it doesn’t, we
have a big problem.
What might poke a giant hole in that logic? Not necessarily a titanic
struggle over the future of Taiwan. A simple mistake, for one thing.
Another speech by Cheng Siwei—perhaps in response to a provocation by
Lou Dobbs. A rumor that the oil economies are moving out of dollars for
good, setting their prices in euros. Leaked suggestions that the Chinese
government is hoping to buy Intel, leading to angry denunciations on
the Capitol floor, leading to news that the Chinese will sit out the
next Treasury auction. As many world tragedies have been caused by
miscalculation as by malice.
Or pent-up political tensions, on all sides. China’s lopsided
growth—ahead in exports, behind in schooling, the environment, and
everything else—makes the country socially less stable as it grows
richer. Meanwhile, its expansion disrupts industries and provokes
tensions in the rest of the world. The billions of dollars China pumps
into the United States each week strangely seem to make it harder rather
than easier for Americans to face their own structural problems. One
day, something snaps. Suppose the CIC makes another bad bet—not another
Blackstone but another WorldCom, with billions of dollars of Chinese
people’s assets irretrievably wiped out. They will need someone to
blame, and Americans, for their part, are already primed to blame China
back.
So, the shock comes. Does it inevitably cause a cataclysm? No one can
know until it’s too late. The important question to ask about the
U.S.–China relationship, the economist Eswar Prasad, of Cornell,
recently wrote in a paper about financial imbalances, is whether it has
“enough flexibility to withstand and recover from large shocks, either
internal or external.” He suggested that the contained tensions were so
great that the answer could be no.
Today’s American system values upheaval; it’s been a while since
we’ve seen too much of it. But Americans who lived through the
Depression knew the pain real disruption can bring. Today’s Chinese,
looking back on their country’s last century, know, too. With a lack of
tragic imagination, Americans have drifted into an arrangement that is
comfortable while it lasts, and could last for a while more. But not
much longer.
Years ago, the Chinese might have averted today’s pressures by
choosing a slower and more balanced approach to growth. If they had it
to do over again, I suspect they would in fact choose just the same
path—they have gained so much, including the assets they can use to do
what they have left undone, whenever the government chooses to spend
them. The same is not true, I suspect, for the United States, which
might have chosen a very different path: less reliance on China’s
subsidies, more reliance on paying as we go. But it’s a little late for
those thoughts now. What’s left is to prepare for what we find at the
end of the path we have taken.