《经济学人》精读58：Lessons from China’s
Debate about how to revive it has implications for the whole country
Feb 22nd 2018 | HARBIN
MAO ZEDONG called China’s three north-eastern provinces—Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning—the country’s “eldest son”. In the Chinese tradition the family’s future rests on that child’s shoulders. But this one is failing in his duties. Debate rages over what has gone wrong and what to do. Many experts conclude that the regional economy needs to be run a different way. Their analysis has lessons for the national economy, too.
Mao made the north-east the centre of heavy industry. It still contains many of China’s largest makers of cars, aircraft and machine tools. In 1978, on the eve of Deng Xiaoping’s economic opening, Liaoning, the most populous of the trio, had the third-largest economy among mainland China’s 31 provinces. Its GDP was 20% bigger than that of Guangdong, the southern province with the biggest population. But 40 years of rapid national growth have left the north-east lagging behind. By 2016 Liaoning had fallen to 14th among provinces by income and had only one third of Guangdong’sGDP. In 1978-2016 its share of China’s output fell by more than half.
东北三省是我国的重工业中心，在1978年辽宁的GDP居全国第三位，超过广东20%。 但经过40年的发展，辽宁现在已经跌落到第14位，GDP仅占广东的三分之一
东北三省该如何发展，怎样发展，以什么路子发展都引起了很大的讨论，这个讨论也适用于全国经济的发展...
As long ago as 2003 a worried national government drew up a plan “to revitalise the old north-east industrial bases”.It did so by vastly increasing state investment, which jumped from 30% of regional GDP in 2000 to 60% five years later. Even this was not enough. In 2016 the government ladled out another vast dollop of money.
Three unusual features account for some of the region’s problems. First, Maoist planning left it more dependent on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than other areas. In China as a whole 17% of industrial jobs are in SOEs. In Liaoning the share is 40%; in Heilongjiang 55%.These firms are inefficient and many are unprofitable. Houze Song of the Paulson Institute, a think-tank, calculates that the return on assets of Liaoning’s SOEs fell from 3% in the mid 2000s to minus 1% in 2015—ie, they were losing money (see chart).
ladle: to take up and carry (a liquid) by using a large spoon: to serve( a liquid) with a ladle
dollop: a small amount of something
三个因素让东北的经济出现问题： 第一是过度依赖国有资本，而且东北三省的国企已经开始出现亏损！
Second, the region, which has 109m people, is ageing fast, even by Chinese standards. At 39.2 years, Liaoning’s median age (the point at which half the population is older, half younger) is the oldest in the country. The north-eastern provinces have a fertility rate—a measure of how many children women are likely to have—below one. The only other provincial-level areas that have such ultra-low fertility are the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin.
The north-east is losing its best and brightest. Jiang Ping graduated in 2015 from the prestigious Number 3 HighSchool in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang. She, along with 19 of her 47classmates, left for universities in Beijing. All of them expect to stay in the capital when they graduate. In contrast, all but one of her father’s high-school classmates live and work in Harbin. The Harbin Institute ofTechnology is one of China’s top engineering universities. Only 3% of its alumni stay in the province.
第二点是人口老龄化，东三省有1.09亿人口，年龄中位数是39.2岁！而且生育率低于1，这么低生育率的地区只有北京上海和天津。还有这个地区最好最聪明的人都在离开，去其他地区发展...
Third, the north-east has an unusually strong collectivist tradition. Song Changtie manages a textile firm in the coastal province of Jiangsu, having lived in the north-east for 30 years. He wrote last year that Chinese people from other regions “cannot imagine how accustomed” north-easterners are to government control. History, he says,explains the difference. The north-east was a puppet state of Japan in 1932-45 and endured autocratic planning for a generation longer than elsewhere.
Still, it is possible to exaggerate the region’s peculiarities. Other provinces have failing SOEs. Half a dozen have declining populations. The region is not, on average, poor (see map). And although it is near the bottom of China’s league table of growth, the north-east is growing fast by the standards of rust belts globally. According to official figures, its GDP expanded by almost 7% a year in 2011-16, though the Liaoning provincial government admitted to falsifying its accounts for 2011-14, so the official statistics are suspect.
autocrat: a person who rules with total power
autocratic
peculiarity: the quality or state of being unusual or peculiar
falsify: to make something false: to change something in order to make people believe something that is not true
第三个点就是这个地区的集体主义比较强，后面的省略...自己读哈
总结：Part 1 讲问题， Part 2 讲怎么解决问题，讨论，思路等
to be continued... tomorrow
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Results
Lexile®Measure: 1000L - 1100L
Mean Sentence Length: 13.73
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.17
Word Count: 618
这篇文章的最后部分蓝思值是在1000-1100L， 是经济学人里最简单的了，适合大一大二的学生看，而且这篇是关于中国的，内容比较熟悉！
使用kindle断断续续地读《经济学人》三年，发现从一开始磕磕碰碰到现在比较顺畅地读完，进步很大，推荐购买！点击这里可以去亚马逊官网购买~
