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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (4834)	5/21/2005 3:23:09 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

Cultural Revolution: CEOs Praise China's Pro-Business Climate GM CEO Wagoner says that Chinese government officials tend to be open-minded and pragmatic. And Goldman Sachs CEO Paulson commends their financial policies. By Justin Fox Most Western businesspeople wouldn’t want to live in a one-party state, but a lot of them sure like working with one. CEOs from around the world are eager to do business with the nominally Communist state of China. And at the FORTUNE Global Forum this week in Beijing, some of them downright waxed poetic about working with the Chinese. General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner told the conference on Tuesday that when he talks to Chinese government officials about emissions standards for vehicles, he is bowled over by how open-minded and thoughtful they are. “When we visit government officials around the world, they don’t always have that open mind or level of pragmatism,” he said. When FORTUNE’s Alex Taylor asked Wagoner if he might want to bring a few Beijing politicians to Washington to talk sense into their American counterparts about corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for cars and light trucks, the GM boss simply laughed. At a panel discussion I was leading on the fate of the dollar, another American businessman wondered if the current bilateral jostling over the yuan-dollar exchange rate might not be a perfect demonstration of why China was better served by a one-party state than a multi-party one. In the West, he went on, posturing politicians often dominate trade policy discussions. (U.S. policy right now is being steered by Senators Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham, who want to punish China with import tariffs, if it doesn’t revalue its currency to make its products more expensive in dollars.) Finally, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, speaking about the opening up of the Chinese financial markets, gushed: “[Chinese] policymakers so far have gotten so many things right that I think they’ll get it all right.” The most obvious explanation for this capitalist-communist lovefest is that one-party rule gives China's policies more continuity and less silliness than you get in a multiparty democracy. At least, that's been the case since 1978, when Deng Xiaoping launched the country on its current semi-capitalist path. (“Market socialism” is the phrase the Chinese officials here like to use.) China’s government-with its stated commitment to bring in more foreign investment-tends to be more businesslike than most Western CEOs are accustomed to encountering in their home countries. Corporations are one-party entities too, after all. To give you an idea of how pro-business China is these days, here's the headline of the lead story on President Hu Jintao's speech in Tuesday's China Daily: "You come, you profit, we all prosper." It’s not that everything’s perfect for foreign business here: BMW’s Helmut Panke said it took his company nine years to get all the regulatory approvals needed to start making cars in Shenyang-as opposed to less than a year in South Carolina. And of course, there’s the even bigger question as to whether an unelected one-party government really can be more responsive and responsible to its citizens over time than a raucous democracy can. If you believe at all in the virtues of competition, that’s a mighty hard argument to make. But then, most people in business don’t actually like competition. fortune.com