Doug writes:
>
> On May 27, 2007, at 11:11 PM, Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
>> Most of this burgeoning production appears to be by foreign firms.
>> Since
>> Deng, we know that the country has been thrown wide open to to foreign
>> investment and I have understood that they were leading China's
>> development,
>> but not at all to the extent suggested in an article from the
>> latest issue
>> of the Australian Marxist publication, Green Left Weekly, posted on
>> Lou
>> Proyect's list last week. Under the headline "China: Foreign capital
>> controls three quarters of industry", Eva Cheng - citing a study
>> from the
>> Beijing Communication University - writes that "foreign capital
>> controls the
>> top five firms in every industry where Beijing allows foreign
>> investment.
>> Additionally, in 21 out of China's 28 leading industrial sectors
>> foreign
>> capital controls most of the assets."
>
> This is at odds with what most other sources say. E.g. a 2006 working
> paper from the IMF <http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2006/
> wp06265.pdf> says:
>
>> Foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) account for a small share of
>> investment.6 The share of
>> such investment has hovered around 10 percent of total investment,
>> roughly split between
>> foreign-invested firms and those from Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR, and
>> Taiwan Province
>> of China. This finding is consistent with the data on sources of
>> financing, which show that
>> foreign capital is only a small share of financing.
>
> And much of the investment, reports the paper, is from firms'
> internal funds (as opposed to funds raised externally from banks or
> markets - thereby repeating the experience of most of the rest of the
> world). Note too in the memo on the Article IV consultation <http://
> www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pn/2006/pn06103.htm> that direct
> investment is a relatively small share of the BoP.
>
>> If accurate, these statistics suggest a degree of foreign control
>> characteristic of a colonial or semi-colonial dependency - the
>> country's
>> condition before the Chinese Revolution.
>
> China is plainly not some sort of dependency; Hank Paulson is begging
> them to open up their financial markets and they're giving him the
> brushoff. Which is another reason to wonder about the stats.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________