China Doomerism, the once familiar retreat of a chummy pantheon of economic cranks, recently went mainstream with Nouriel Roubini's pronouncement that the Chinese economy is wrestling with over-investment and his prediction that it will likely to come to a hard landing and deflationary spiral sometime after 2013. We read the same news he does, which leads us to ask what the experts have to say about this, and what on earth any of this has to do with Shanghai truckers and Groupon China?In addition to regular guests Jeremy Goldkorn and Gady Epstein, this week Sinica is pleased to host Andrew Batson, former journalist for the Wall Street Journal and current head of research at Dragonomics, a leading research advisory on the Chinese economy and publisher of the China Economic Quarterly. And we hope you'll join us yourselves as Gady confronts Andrew with probing questions about the Chinese economy: what do the statistics tell us about whether China is investing too much and consuming too little. If you follow economics and enjoyed our earlier episode with Arthur Kroeber then this is a podcast you don't want to miss.Enjoy Sinica and want to get Kaiser and crew downloaded to your mp3 player automatically every week? Then consider subscribing to Sinica via RSS feed. If you use iTunes, you can do this most easily by creating an account at Popup Chinese and following the instructions provided. Alternately, open up iTunes and select the option "Subscribe to Podcast" from the Advanced menu. When prompted copy the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica into the box. And if you'd like to listen to this podcast on the go, you're also welcome to download the show as a standalone mp3 file. Enjoy!
robert.welch999
said on May 2, 2011
I enjoyed the pod cast but I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what excess capacity means. Excess capacity does not mean that there is too much stuff; the term refers to the ability to produce verse the demand. Excess capacity occurs when the ability to produce goods far exceeds demand in the market place and so firms cannot reach optimal production. You can have inflation and excess capacity if you have inflation in the commodities used for production (Roubini mentions this here: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011415133455105416.html).
I have worked for both small and large scale manufacturers in China in the consumer goods and textiles industries and there is plenty of excess capacity in those industries. The companies I worked for were profitable but the industries as a whole had a tremendous amount of slack. I would conduct competitive intelligence surveys and ask about lead time and production abilities and the answers that I received lead me to believe that many companies were using less than 60% (that is accounting for misrepresentation of data) of their production capacity and there were still new competitors entering the market, increasing capacity even more.
nortonwhose
said on May 3, 2011
It seems that China's production is still largely fueled by a labor force rather than production capital like machinery automated production lines. This is a completely anecdotal statement and I'm basing it solely on mass media attention to China's factories. However, I do remember China being a a favorite example of my microeconomic text book in college as a labor driven production force where instead of a street sweeper you have hundreds of people with brooms. In fact that was one of the specific examples pointed to.
cjwalther
said on May 6, 2011
I like the recommendations at the end of the show. It would be great to add pertinent link to the show notes here.-- Just a suggestion...
zhou.youan
said on May 21, 2011
very good point about leaving references to the recommendations here on the site. I was trying to work out the details, especially on the documentary about the police, sadly no joy....yes google is my friend, but sadly let me down on this occasion.
尼古拉斯桑
said on May 22, 2011
The Documentary is actually available (you may have already figured this out but what the hell) on Amazon for $250.00! I hope it makes the rounds here in the states. I'm not sure why its so damn expensive.
Aron Bothman
said on July 2, 2012
Recommendation links from this episode: Crime and Punishment 罪与罚, documentary by Zhao Liang 赵亮. Excerpt on Youtube Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey China Beat BlogFilms by Jiang Wen 姜文:Let the Bullets Fly 让子弹飞, subtitled by Brendan O'KaneDevils on the Doorstep 鬼子来了In the Heat of the Sun 阳光灿烂的日子 Guan yun chang 关云长 City of Life and Death 南京! 南京! by Lu Chuan 陆川
Brendan
said on July 2, 2012
Hi Aron -- I'd second the recommendation of 让子弹飞/Let the Bullets Fly, but as far as I know, the subtitles out there are not the ones I did. Jiang ended up not liking my subtitles, not that I am still upset about this or anything, and it sounds like the subtitles being used for the US DVD release are different from the original Hong Kong theatrical subtitles (which were done in December 2010, before I was contacted). I don't know if any of the work I did ended up making it into those subs, but it doesn't sound like it from what I've heard.
Aron Bothman
said on July 4, 2012
Thanks, Brendan. So your subtitles were used in the US theatrical release, but not afterwards? I just included the link because of the specific shout-out on the podcast.
Brendan
said on July 4, 2012
I'm not sure what subs were used for the US theatrical release, but going by the reviews I read, it sounds like they went with the original Hong Kong theatrical subtitles, probably to save the cost of making new prints of the film. Whoever mentioned me in the podcast was working with incomplete information -- but this was in May 2011,so I was too: I sent off my subtitles in April 2011 and spent the next four months assuming that they'd been used until I was contacted by the director's assistant in August with the news that they hadn't been. It's kind of a bummer -- my subs were, I think, some of the best work I've ever done -- but so it goes.
