I have been fortunate in my life to have traveled and lived in many places, in many countries.
In 2000, globalization struck me and the company I work for. The factory of thousands was to be outsourced to China, to the Garden City of Suzhou.
The first time I traveled to Suzhou, to set up equipment and train the Chinese engineers, Suzhou was much like a place you would imagine a large Chinese city to be. Bicycles, buses pumping out smoke, and cars that looked like they had traveled the great wall itself - and back again. the roads were decrepit, and not much western influence could be seen in the city center or the market places, nor restaurants. Indeed there was only 1 western hotel. you would walk around to the quizzical looks of the residents of the garden city.
But the Garden City has something else too.... A concrete jungle.
The suzhou industrial park (SIP) was expanding as more and more companies like mine sought to take advantage of the "free trade" zone and of course cheap labor.
Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) is a cooperative project of priority between Chinese and Singaporean governments and saw its debut in February 1994 as certified by the State Council of PRC. During the past decade, SIP has seen quick development and the chief economic indices all grow at a rate of around 50%.
In 2003 alone, the investment in fixed assets in SIP exceeded 20.2 billion yuan, an increase of 94% over the previous year. The total output value reached 36.5 billion yuan, an increase of 45% over 2002. The local budget revenue registered 2.05 billion, up by 55.8%. The total value of import and export was 14.4 billion USD, in which export accounted for 6 billion, growing 150% and 134% respectively. The newly contracted foreign investment reached 2.1 billion USD and the utilized investment reached 1.2 billion USD, increasing 20% and 32% respectively. The registered domestic investment reached 11.1 billion yuan. During the past decade, SIP has provided over 120, 000 new jobs.
Today if you visited Suzhou, the locals would no longer bat an eye as you walked by, in fact they may be too busy eating a McDonalds or a slice of Pizza from Pizza hut. The old markets are still there, but the growth in knocks-offs is exponential. You have to travel miles from the city to rediscover "China". the roads to the city and industrial areas are modern, with spaghetti flyovers, the bicycles still there, but slowly giving way to modern cars, especially Buicks made in China. They are even planning and preparing a subway under the city.
The SIP itself has grown exponentially, as you can tell from the numbers above, and is rapidly completing it's phase 3, growing it to almost 70 square km. On the other side of the freeway from SIP is an incredible sight. Sprouting from the ground like concrete beanstalks are tower blocks, row upon row of them to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who have migrated here from around the country, ready to take their share of the Chinese dream.
The above graph is the number of corporations located in Suzhou - 576 of which are foreign.
This is happening all over China. the latest noises coming out of that country is a plan to turn one of the largest islands in the Shanghai river into the worlds largest ship building sector, to compete with the Japanese and South Koreans, and to fill their growing need for transporters and container ships.
But this is all just infrastructure and investment and not the story i want to tell, not really.
Until we got to roughly this point, globalization has almost worked. We have lost many industries to the cheap low tech workers of China, but others have risen to take their places. Intellectual property theft in China is rampant and state sponsored and has seriously impacted our transition, but globalization is about to turn very very sour for the US worker.
Globalization only worked so long as their was imbalance. We had the brains, they had the brawn - or rather the will to work for peanuts in none skilled and semi skilled industries. This isn't the case anymore.
Engineering college enrollment is steadily increasing in China, 80% of colleges offer engineering degrees ( 1300 out of 1625 colleges )
In China, 34% of the college population is enrolled in engineering programs
China and India graduate 1,000,000 undergraduate engineers annually
China has an enrollment of 4 million engineering students
The US leadership consists 90% of lawyers The Chinese leadership consists 90% of engineers
Along with their investment in infrastructure, the Chinese have also invested in their people, or at least some of them. The standard of their engineers is increasing with each year. The top flight engineers who once came to the US for education and work are returning to train and help the new generation and become industry leaders and with the drain of this talent, the imbalance is shrinking too.
Very soon, less than a decade, China will no longer have to rely on copy-cat corporations, but will instead be industry leaders in many sectors, leaving behind the short sighted US corporations who can only look so far as the next quarterly report.
Chinas domestic market will grow as the ranks of their middle class grow, and they will become increasingly less reliant on export trade for expansion, as they sever the symbiotic tie with the US, leaving us with just distant memories of our own hegemon.
By the time this transition is complete, my career will be over no doubt and I will be left with many memories of my travels and of the garden city blossoming. but my children and their children will inherit a bankrupt America, bankrupt by the short sighted greed of corporate America.
The fear Americans should have, while they bicker about abortion, or pray in school, or creationism, isn't Al Qaeda, or Iranian WMD, it's the flourishing education of Chinese workers.
While we pile dollar upon dollar onto our debt financed not least in part by the Chinese, they are spending their money wisely, investing in a bright future.
It is time we did too.
