Free Republic

J. D. Power & Associates calculates that four-fifths of all new cars sold in China are bought by people who have never bought a car before — not even a used car. That number has remained at that level for each of the last four years. By contrast, less than a tenth of new cars in the United States are purchased by people who have never bought a new car before, and fewer than 1 percent of all new cars are sold to people who have never bought a new or used car before.

China’s currency, the yuan, rose against the dollar on Thursday, reaching a milestone that is just the latest sign of this country’s growing economic power. For the first time in more than a decade, the dollar bought less than 7 yuan, ending the day close to 6.9920, a situation that specialists say will probably make Chinese-made goods more expensive for American consumers and possibly contribute to inflation in the United States.

MIAMI (Reuters) - China's growing wealth is good for the world, and there will come a time when the influence of the United States shrinks to the level of its share of the world population, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said on Friday. ADVERTISEMENT Asked at a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in Miami whether he regarded China's growing influence in Latin America as a threat, Gates, one of the world's richest people, said not at all. "The fact that China is getting rich is overall a very good thing. The fact that more minds are getting educated is huge....

As China expands its reach around the world, its power also is growing in its own backyard. The United States exerts considerably less influence than it used to in Southeast Asia, and China is increasingly filling that role, even in countries that were once firmly anti-communist. They obviously have been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. They've had a very successful development experience, and so they have a lot to offer in terms of both knowledge as well as financing," says Larry Greenwood, vice president of the Asian Development Bank in Manila. "Certainly our experience with China has...

The president is keeping a very low profile on Tibet as the crackdown on Tibetan demonstrators continues. No wonder. China has allowed George W. Bush to make war in Iraq without new taxes. The U.S. government is hostage to China's central bank. In addition to $388 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, China, according to Congressional Research Service, holds another $310 billion of American public and corporate securities

China will sign its first free trade pact with a developed country on April 7 when it inks a deal with New Zealand, according to reports here Sunday. ADVERTISEMENT Details of the agreement, the result of three years of negotiations, will not be released until after the signing ceremony. The New Zealand government has confirmed the date and Prime Minister Helen Clark will lead a delegation of 150 business and government representatives to Beijing for the ceremony, the New Zealand Press Association said.

So questions of semantics aside, what's really going on? The answer is that while China is widely viewed as an export powerhouse, selling everything from garden gnomes to laptop computers overseas, most of its economic growth is still fueled by domestic investment and consumption, neither of which has shown much sign of slowdown so far. Anderson reckons that China's gross domestic product growth will slow to 10% this year, down from 11.4% in 2007, hardly the kind of slump to cause serious concern for Beijing. A More Open Economy Still, the Chinese economy is far more open than it was...

Transition economics suggests that China grew rapidly because inefficiencies of the prereform planning system were eliminated. Agricultural and industrial reforms unleashed incentives and thereby caused an immediate increase in output. Competition between enterprises, increasingly under private management, led to cost-cutting and innovation. The Chinese diaspora helped with management techniques, finance and knowledge of foreign markets. China's economy could not but grow. But once the gains of transition are exhausted, China's patch of rapid economic growth will end.

China's economy will keep growing fast for up to 30 more years thanks to its vast domestic market and foreign investment, incoming World Bank chief economist Justin Lin Yifu said Friday.

The US economy and foreign policy are at risk of being overwhelmed by cosmic economic shifts driven by immense rapidly industrialising societies like India and China, an American senator has warned.

China passed Canada to become the largest source of products shipped into the U.S. last year, capping a six-year period when its exports to the U.S. more than tripled. Chinese trade is accelerating faster than imports from Mexico after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994.

Despite breathless media reports about the World Bank revising downward its estimate for the size of China's economy,[1] what the figures really show is that China has indeed overtaken the United States in manufacturing output. As an industrial giant, China needs to be taken seriously as an international economic force and a strategic and military power

The U.S. dollar is getting weaker and weaker, and many medium to small U.S. companies are in economic crisis. So they need investments from China. It is very good timing," said Yu Dan, a representative for the state of Pennsylvania in China

Analysts say China closing in on Germany as the world's third-largest economy could help to drive world growth in the event of a U.S. slowdown, though they say it alone cannot fill the whole gap.

XIANGHE, China ?Opening thorny trade talks with China on Wednesday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stressed the rising interdependence of the two economies required flexible exchange rates, guarantees of product safety and reduced trade barriers

The American government frequently accuses China of relying excessively on exports. But David Carbon, an economist at DBS, a Singaporean bank, suggests that America is starting to look like the pot that called the kettle black. In the year to September, net exports accounted for more than 30% of America's total GDP growth in 2007. Another popular belief looks ripe for reappraisal: it seems that domestic demand is a bigger driver of China's growth than it is of America's.

The current determination in China echoes what Americans experienced in the 1960s during the space race. Back then, we had a national focus. Programs touched everyone, even school children. We were thrilled to see an American take that first small step on the moon. The investments made to propel the U.S. through the space race and its military twin, the cold war defense buildup, became cornerstones of American economic prosperity.

Chinese leaders are intent on expanding investment overseas, while boosting imports from abroad to help reduce a yawning trade deficit. That has created a feeding frenzy for charlatans and speculators, who, armed with a few Mandarin bons mots, have set themselves up as rainmakers. They subsist on obfuscation, encouraging each side to believe that the other is impenetrable.

The size of China's economy is overestimated by some 40 percent based on most current measures, but is the world's second largest, the World Bank said Monday.

"(The yuan) is not the key issue. Currently my focus is more on the depreciation of the US dollar and its possible impact and repercussions for the world economy," Chen told reporters on the sidelines of the conference.

<p>Too many people have been worried about the wrong thing -- worried that China's growth is somehow going to hurt the rest of the world," Paulson was quoted as saying.</p>

Dalian's graduates are equal in quality to those of the United States or Ireland and "maybe a bit better," said Kirby Jefferson, the Intel plant's general manager and a veteran of facilities in Ireland and the United States

China is moving up the supply chain," said T. J. Bond, chief Asia economist at Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong. "The view that China produces labor-intensive goods but purchases high-value-added goods from abroad may be roughly correct today, but it need not last forever."

China is on course to catch up with the United States and join the front ranks of world economic powers, but that is little cause for concern even among Americans, a global survey said Monday. But the same poll showed there is generally as much distrust of the United States as there is of China to "act responsibly" in world affairs.

Charity rejoices in our neighbor's good, while envy grieves over it." That quotation from Thomas Aquinas sums up the current China debate. America has a choice to make, between taking comfort in China's poverty reduction — the greatest in human history, largely achieved using our economic model — or wishing it back to the failed state it was before the boom began.

Several other executives also expressed similar thoughts at a Santa Clara, Calif., conference Wednesday hosted by Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association. The Silicon Valley group works to encourage Chinese entrepreneurs. That belief is a big shift from just a few years ago, when most prized the country mainly for its low-cost labor and emerging consumer base. Rather than simply consuming U.S. goods and services, many are betting the country will become a hub for new products and innovation.

For the past decade China has bragged of an economy growing about 8 percent a year, but the numbers are as cooked as a bowl of lo mein. University of Pittsburgh economist Thomas G. Rawski suspects the dictatorship's expansion was only 40 percent of official figures, the April 8 issue of BusinessWeek reports. How could growth domestic product have gained 24.7 percent from 1997 to 2000, he asks, when energy use fell 12.8 percent? Rawski thinks the Chinese economy shrank a couple of percent in 1998 and 1999 instead of growing more than 7 percent each year, as Beijing claims....