Car News Articles

Via
NY Times

Seeing the Sights of Industrial China: 2 Factories, 2 Futures

By JOE NOCERA

SHANGHAI

“The RMB is killing me,” groaned Jin Jue.

Mr. Jin, a hip-looking 35-year-old with spiky hair and an all-black ensemble, describes himself on his business card as the “board chairman” of the Shanghai Jinjue Fashion Company. It was my first full day in China, and Mr. Jin was showing me around his factory on the outskirts of town.

RMB, of course, is shorthand for renminbi, the Chinese currency, also known as the yuan, which, since the beginning of the year, has risen more than 4 percent against the declining dollar. Even as the Chinese economy has become increasingly powerful, the government has kept the yuan artificially low, much to the annoyance of the United States. Truth to tell, it is still not nearly as high as it would be if it were unmoored from government control. When the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr. , was in Beijing this week, he praised the recent rise of the yuan though— as he invariably does when he’s in China — he called on Chinese officialsto let their currency float freely.

This is my first trip to China and, like most Americans, I had an image of what a Chinese factory looked like. Mr. Jin’s operation fit that image almost to a T. It was housed in a run-down building amid a sea of run-down buildings in the Kun Shan industrial zone, just northwest of Shanghai. Except for Mr. Jin’s own office, it was really just one cavernous room, filled with rows of tables, on which stood old-fashioned sewing machines. There was a cafeteria with rickety wooden chairs and beaten-up tables where the workers ate their meals, and a sad-looking dormitory where they slept. Behind the building was a dirty-looking river. Debris littered its banks.