经济学家杂志

经济学家杂志 The battle for Libya The colonel fights back Colonel Muammar Qaddafi is trying to tighten his grip on the west, while the rebelsâ?? inexperience leaves them vulnerable in the east AT MIDNIGHT army pickup trucks trawl Benghazi, the rebels’ main town, collecting thawar, or revolutionaries, for the front. Four-day veterans exhale their modern equivalent of a war-cry, a hail of anti-aircraft bullets blasted into the night sky, and bundle Ahmed Labeidi, a pint-size boy, into the truck. Almost half his class have already joined up. The minimum age for the draft has been lowered to 15. “My father told me to join my friends,” he says sadly, bowing to peer pressure. Recruits are meant to have a week’s instruction before the thawar head west. Many get less. In a schoolyard a few score of boys, plus a pensioner who says he last held a gun 35 years ago, gather for three hours of training. They have only four guns, and the instructors are late. “Perhaps they’ve left for the front,” says an organiser. Instead of being taught to shoot, raw recruits are being told to take inspiration from Omar Mukhtar, a Libyan jihadist who fought (albeit in vain) against Italian imperialists in the 1920s, armed just with an ancient Ottoman rifle. Lacking in experience though they plainly are, the thawar have had some success. Last week they ousted the colonel’s troops from two oil ports, Brega and Ras Lanuf, between Tripoli, the capital, in the west and Benghazi, the rebels’ headquarters in the east. But then, as they pushed on, the rebels were ambushed at Bin Jawwad, west of Ras Lanuf, and have since taken heavy losses. Ambulances race to the front with recruits, defying orders from calmer leaders to reinforce the front line only where they are confident of holding it. “You can be a martyr fighting Qaddafi’s planes here,” the young recruits shout at teenage newcomers. The colonel seems to be biding his time, consolidating his hold in the west and concentrating his superior firepower on Zawiya and Misrata, the two rebel-held towns closest to Tripoli. As The Economist went to press, reports suggest he may have retaken Zawiya. He may then counter-attack eastward towards Benghazi. Overall, the outcome of what has become a civil war is still in the balance. But the colonel may be recouping after his initial setbacks. His forces are superior in numbers, weaponry and organisation, though neither side can boast much of the last. He still commands the bulk of an army that was 50,000-strong before the uprising against him began. Some 6,000 of his troops have joined the rebels, who number many thousands of volunteers but have only rudimentary equipment. Half of the deserters take orders from General Suleiman Mahmoud, based in Tobruk, north-east of Benghazi, and another 1,000 or so special forces are led by Colonel Qaddafi’s former interior minister, Abdel Fatah Younis. Though both men declared their defection, they seem to be defying demands by the rebels’ “national transitional council” (see article) to throw their military weight fully behind the war against their former comrades still loyal to the colonel. Perhaps they are hedging their bets. “They’re playing games,” says a council member. Another 2,000-odd army defectors answer to Major Ahmed Qetrani, who sounds more whole-hearted in his support for the rebels. “He’s forcing me to intervene,” he says of Colonel Qaddafi from an operations room in Benghazi, after receiving the latest news of an air raid on Ras Lanuf’s water tank. But even Major Qetrani seems loth to wage all-out war against Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. “It would create two Libyan armies, it would make fitna [civil war], it would 第 1 页 共 18 页 ruin our infrastructure and set our country back 100 years,” he says. Whereas the front line is thin and shaky, there is a security vacuum in Benghazi. The east-based units of army, which at first declared for the rebels, have retired to their bases and are loth to guard government buildings and institutions against pro-Qaddafi forces. “We want the army to defend the liberated cities,” says a member of the national council. “But they have not been playing their part.” The gates of four of the eastern zone’s main arsenals have remained open since four of Colonel Qaddafi’s brigades fled to the government’s zone in the west. The largest, at Rajma, outside Benghazi, exploded on March 5th, reportedly killing 40 people. After the blast, young thawar rather than the army cordoned off the surroundings. The police are also lying low, apparently afraid of the locals’ wrath. In their absence, the thawar patrol the streets with police truncheons. Fear that Colonel Qaddafi may recover control over the whole country, including the liberated east, may be growing. A grenade was recently hurled into a Benghazi hotel full of Western journalists. At another hotel the senior managers have fled. Rumours are swirling of bombs to be planted near the court-house where the council meets. There is talk of plots to assassinate council members. In the eastern hinterland, rebels have hoisted the old tricolour that was the national flag before Colonel Qaddafi took power in 1969. But few of Benghazi’s people are brave enough to fly it on their houses. The rebels are patently ill-equipped. “Our tanks and artillery are derelict,” says a special-forces officer who defected to the rebels. “They were kept simply for national pageants.” The arms dumps abandoned by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces in the east have ammunition but no guns. The rebels have only half a dozen or so out-of-date aircraft—without bombs. Grand plans for an amphibious landing to relieve Misrata, the beleaguered rebel-held town sandwiched between the colonel’s two strongholds, Tripoli and Sirte, his home town, have apparently been shelved. Despite his superior numbers and firepower on land, sea and in the air, the colonel seems mainly to be holding back for now. After failing to recapture the oil terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf, he has apparently laid a ring of landmines to defend Sirte and deployed a brigade there, led by one of his sons, Saadi.After weeks of demonstrations, Tripoli is once again said to be quiet. The colonel controls Libya’s western border and nearby gasfields. Much depends on the loyalty of Libya’s tribes. Omar Hariri, from the powerful Farjani tribe, has been made head of the rebels’ military council, in the hope of stirring strife with Colonel Qaddafi’s own clan around Sirte. But the colonel has long been a master of tribal politics. He has been shoring up old alliances, not least by taking male hostages from the main tribes, including the Warfalla, the largest, with an implicit threat that he may kill them if their tribes rise up. The thawar say the colonel is using women and children as human shields on the front line; if they are killed, tribal codes will require their relatives to turn on the rebels. As the rebels’ dream of conquering Tripoli unaided fades, their other aim, to hold fast in the east, may begin to look optimistic too. Rebel leaders speak with foreboding of the prospect that, once the colonel has recovered his grip in the west, he may turn his tanks and aircraft to the east. Calls by the rebel council for foreigners to come to the rescue, muted a week ago, sound increasingly desperate. Most easterners strongly oppose the idea of friendly foreign troops on the ground, but pleas for air raids against Colonel Qaddafi’s base in Tripoli—and for a no-fly zone imposed by the West—have become a lot louder. Britain and France are tilting towards an outright demand in the UN Security Council for a no-fly zone, but the Americans are still hesitant and the Russians against. The outcome of this debate could decide the fate of Libya and its dogged colonel. 第 2 页 共 18 页 China's security state The truncheon budget China boosts spending on welfareâ?”and on internal security, too AMONG the misleading and ill-explained details that, as usual, spiced up China’s annual budget, unveiled on March 5th, were some especially eye-catching numbers for security. The surprise was not just that China’s military budget had resumed double-digit growth after a one-year hiatus, but that spending on internal security was higher and growing even faster. The state sees an abundance of threats within. The risk that turmoil in the Middle East will spread to China is one of them, though the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, studiously avoided mentioning events there in his two-hour address to the country’s legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC). Mr Wen did, however, speak of the need to “solve problems that cause great resentment among the masses”, such as the illegal demolition of housing and the forced appropriation of farmland. The NPC session, an annual rubber-stamp affair lasting a few days, was full of measures intended as crowd-pleasers. Central-government spending on education, health care and social security is to increase by more than 16%, and on subsidised housing by more than a third. Two days before the session began, Chinese media published a surprising survey indicating that only 6% of citizens felt happy. More welfare spending, perhaps, is to keep unhappy people off the streets. Officials are less eager to draw attention to their preferred option for keeping the peace, namely beefing up security. The budget presented to the NPC calls for spending of 624 billion yuan ($95 billion) this year on items related to law and order, 13.8% more than in 2010. Military spending is to increase by 12.7%, to 601.1 billion yuan. This follows an unexpected easing of its growth last year to 7.5%. But for a second consecutive year it will be less than the outlay on internal security. The authorities’ horrified response to anonymous calls on the internet for a “jasmine revolution” in China will add to the cost of policing. For three Sundays in a row central areas of several Chinese cities have been saturated with uniformed and plainclothes officers. They have staked out shopping streets where the internet messages have urged protesters to “stroll” (a euphemism often used in China for demonstrating, which the police hardly ever permit). The messages have said these protests, which have yet to materialise, should continue every Sunday indefinitely. The police clearly worry that if they scale back their deployments people will converge at the appointed places. A day after the latest such security operation, the foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, blandly told journalists that he had noticed no kind of tension in China. He also denied that police had beaten foreign journalists trying to report in the designated areas, even though one had been kicked and hit by goons and others roughed up less severely in full view of uniformed officers. The at least partially—their 2007 decision to give foreign authorities have decided to rescind— correspondents freer rein. Now correspondents “must apply for approval” to conduct interviews in Beijing. Antagonism towards the foreign press, and a sweeping round-up of Chinese dissidents, could also signal concerns about tension within the leadership as it prepares to hand over power to a younger generation next year. Power struggles in China have a habit of going hand-in-hand with street 第 3 页 共 18 页 protests (the Tiananmen Square unrest in 1989 broke out amid fierce confrontation at the top). On March 5th-6th the state media, which had kept silent about the “strolls”, published editorials stridently denouncing them. The Beijing Daily called for “constant vigilance against these people with ulterior motives” who wanted to “throw China into turmoil”. Echoes of hardline language at the time of Tiananmen. A rare criticism of the government’s approach appeared this week on the website of the state-run news agency, Xinhua, in an article by a scholar in Singapore. China, it said, would enhance its stability far more if it were to turn its “colossal expenses on stability maintenance” to improving people’s livelihoods instead. The leadership is beefing up spending on both, but seems not to know which one will work better. Japan's political turmoil Abandon hope? Yet again, a Japanese government is tottering “PRIME MINISTER KAN, this is no time for you to nap,” barked Shoji Nishida, an opposition lawmaker shortly before he made insinuations that led to the resignation of Japan’s foreign minister on March 6th. Sure enough, his actions have thrown the government of Naoto Kan (pictured above, right) into peril. During questioning in the Japanese Diet (parliament), Mr Nishida, who is unaffectionately known as the “Bombshell”, forced the minister, Seiji Maehara (pictured above on the left), to admit that he had taken political funding from a Korean-born Japanese resident (see article). That would be illegal if Mr Maehara knowingly accepted the donation, which he says he did not. Mr Maehara abruptly quit, robbing Mr Kan of perhaps the administration’s steadiest hand. The 48-year-old had refurbished Tokyo’s strained relations with America, and looked like a prime minister-in-waiting. He was replaced by his deputy, Takeaki Matsumoto. The blow comes as Mr Kan struggles to pass a budget in the face of political gridlock. The ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) faces a pounding in local elections in April. Soon, Mr Kan may be on the ropes. What chiefly prevents him from becoming the fifth prime minister to fall in as many years is the lack of a credible replacement, either in his party or in the opposition. Mr Kan’s hold over his own party has grown too flimsy for his bold promises to reform Japan’s tax and social-security system, and open the country to free trade, to carry much weight. Yet his rivals in the DPJ, a good many of whom are lowly first-time lawmakers, seem to fear a general election as much as he does. The opposition, led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), threatens to use its upper-house majority to block bills needed to finance next year’s budget. By the summer the government might run out of money. The LDP’s bet is that Mr Kan will need to dissolve parliament in return for winning support for the budget. If he resists, the LDP might censure him in the upper house, producing a similar outcome. 第 4 页 共 18 页 But however unpopular Mr Kan is, the LDP, foaming at the mouth and bereft of ideas, has scarcely more support. Indeed, the only group benefiting from the political mess is a raucous regional tax-cutting movement attacking mainstream politics. Some call it the “sake” party, an allusion to America’s tea-party movement. For all their mutual antagonisms, the mainstream parties broadly share long-term aims for Japan: they want a stronger social-safety net, slightly higher taxes and a more open economy. During nine months in office, however, Mr Kan, a former civil-rights activist, has come across as an agitator rather than a builder of bridges. The opposition, meanwhile, has been petty and vituperative. Neither party would convincingly win a general election. The hunt for a leader with the innate Japanese skill of nemawashi, or consensus-forming, will be key. Such a leader is not in sight. German energy policy Nuclear power? No thanks (again) THIS post will attempt to avoid earthquake, tsunami or nuclear metaphors in discussing the effects of the Japanese catastrophe on Germany, but it will not be easy. Those effects have been sudden and dramatic, both for politics and for policy. Germany is hypersensitive to nuclear peril even at the calmest of times. Its reliance on nuclear power is not great: 17 plants account for around a quarter of electricity generation (see chart). France’s 58 plants, by contrast, produce three quarters of the country’s electricity. Yet Germany’s anti-nuclear movement is lively. The transport of nuclear waste provokes angry blockades; on Saturday, after the Japanese disaster, more than 100,000 people demonstrated against nuclear power across Germany (see picture). Ordinary voters are suspicious of nuclear power. Outright hostility was a driving force in the rise of the opposition Green party. So it was a bold move for Angela Merkel’s “Christian-liberal” coalition to decide last autumn to overturn a plan enacted by a previous government to end nuclear-power generation in Germany by 2022. The plants, the government decreed, would be allowed to operate 12 years longer on average. This was part of a broader energy plan meant to boost conservation, improve energy security and move toward reliance on renewable sources of electricity. No one dared to suggest building new nuclear plants. But it seemed a pity to shut down depreciated plants producing cheap, climate-friendly electricity well before the end of their useful life. Now, with the Fukushima plant spewing radioactivity, Mrs Merkel’s courage has failed. Yesterday she announced that the government would enact a three-month “moratorium” on its plan to extend the operating life of nuclear plants. Today she said that seven plants built before 1980 would be shut down temporarily. Some will probably not reopen. The Japanese disaster is a “turning point in the history of the industrial world,” she said. (There is no sign, though, that a new tax slapped on the nuclear-power companies last year will be scrapped.) Mrs Merkel's decision has much to do with politics, though her allies stoutly deny it. Three of 第 5 页 共 18 页 Germany’s 16 states are holding elections this month: Saxony-Anhalt this Sunday and Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate the following Sunday. The stakes are especially high in Baden-Württemberg, which has been governed by Mrs Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), for more than half a century. A loss would be a disaster for her. Pre-tsunami, the CDU and its coalition partner in Baden-Württemberg, the Free Democratic Party (which is also part of Mrs Merkel’s government) had been narrowly ahead of the Social Democrats and the Greens. But Stefan Mappus, the state's premier, is one of the CDU’s loudest advocates of nuclear power; he wanted an even longer extension of the nuclear operating deadline (and when Mrs Merkel’s environment minister, Norbert Röttgen, resisted, hinted that he should resign). Post-tsunami, Mr Mappus’s enthusiasm for fission looked politically dangerous. Hence Mrs Merkel's hasty retreat from the nuclear-deadline extension. The opposition has been quick to accuse Mrs Merkel of trickery: won’t she go back to her pro-nuclear ways after the moratorium expires and the elections are safely out of the way? Probably not. Mrs Merkel knows that German nukes are no more dangerous now than they were before the Fukushima explosions. A trained physicist, when asked why her assessment of the risk has suddenly changed, she squirms. But she also knows that the political risks have risen, probably for good. That means that the government will have to come up with a new energy policy that reassures voters without driving up costs or jeopardising its ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions. Germany may thus be in the market for a new “bridge” technology. Perhaps it will be gas. Entrepreneurship in China Let a million flowers bloom China is often held up as an object lesson in state-directed capitalism. Yet its economic dynamism owes much to those outside the governmentâ??s embrace IT IS Sunday January 2nd, a national holiday, in a medium-sized Chinese city, just north of the Taiwan Strait. The temperature is well below freezing. There is no heating in the factory, which makes components for electrical tools. This probably reflects frugality rather than a ban, imposed by Mao Zedong, covering every building south of the Yangzi river. A thin haze of winter light comes through the windows. The only other sources of illumination are flickering cathode-ray computer terminals, which make silhouettes of the heavily clad workers sitting at them. Down the corridor, in a huge office even colder than the main floor, the company’s president sits at the head of a low table surrounded by friends. His hands are too busy to shiver, plucking tiny cups out of boiling water and making tea with a jumble of strainers and clay kettles. The cups are passed around, returned, and passed again, providing little jolts of warmth. The friend to his left has his own company, also making tools: the two of them are links in China’s vast, fast-expanding production line. Another man, possibly an official, is just leaving, having concluded discussions about a new factory. A fourth, who runs a private investment firm, explains 第 6 页 共 18 页 why work goes on even during a holiday by citing the title of an American film: “Money Never Sleeps.” Each of the three businessmen at the table grew up in families which struggled even to afford food; each now owns at least four luxury cars. The results of similar stories can be seen outside other factories, where work also seems to be going on: in the car parks are BMWs, Jaguars, Land Rovers, Mercedes and Porsches. The prices of nearby flats equal those in the richest Western cities. And Chinese money is buying not only cars and property, but also the tractors and backhoes that are preparing the ground for a new lot of buildings. The twilight zone Luxury goods notwithstanding, wealth is created quietly in Zhejiang’s cities and other places that not long ago were wretchedly poor. None of the people interviewed for this story wanted to be named. Their companies tend to be small and privately owned. They make ordinary (but increasingly good) products under their own names, or sophisticated ones under the strictest anonymity for well-known foreign companies which demand silence as a condition of doing business. Of the foreigners’ many demands, this is likely to be the most welcome. The right of China’s private companies to exist is by no means clear. Private companies with more than eight employees began to emerge only in 1981 and were not officially sanctioned until 1988 (the number was drawn from an essay by Karl Marx on an inflection point for the creation of a rentier class); and China has a brutal history of ideological retreats. Today’s entrepreneur can become tomorrow’s convict. Best, therefore, to avoid too much attention. Not all China’s private businessmen are as reticent as the quiet men of Zhejiang. A handful of private entrepreneurs, it is true, have won the backing of the state in the form of finance or legal forbearance—and with it a bit of fame. This reinforces the common belief that China’s economic success is an object lesson in state capitalism. The government owns the biggest companies: as the economy grows at double-digit rates year after year, vast state-owned enterprises are climbing the world’s league tables in every industry from oil to banking. Yet alongside the mighty state engine myriad smaller ones are whirring—and probably more efficiently. China’s state-controlled entities are not particularly profitable. A study by Qiao Liu, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, concludes that the average return on equity for companies wholly or partly owned by the state is barely 4%, despite the benefit of cheap leverage provided by government-controlled banks. According to a recently published paper by Mr Liu and a colleague, Alan Siu, the returns of unlisted private firms are no less than ten percentage points higher. Another sign of the economic energy of the private sector can be found in its rate of growth. According to China Macro Finance, a research firm in New York, the number of registered private businesses grew by more than 30% a year between 2000 and 2009 (see chart 1). The gross figure (ie, before netting off firms that closed) was at least seven percentage points higher, estimates 第 7 页 共 18 页 Ronald Schramm, China Macro Finance’s managing director. These figures exclude unregistered businesses, among them the country’s ubiquitous tiny offices and manufacturers. Millions of people trade through electronic platforms like Taobao, which is intended as a site for individuals but has listings for transactions involving volumes that could not possibly be for personal consumption. At a conference in November Zheng Yumin, the Communist Party secretary for Zhejiang’s commerce department, said that there were 43m companies in China, 93% of them private, employing 92% of the country’s workers. No one knows quite how much private companies contribute to China’s fast-growing economy. Chinese firms fall into a bewildering variety of legal categories and their respective contributions to GDP are not reported in official statistics. However, enterprises that are not majority-owned by the state account for two-thirds of industrial output, according to the latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics. And according to Eva Yi of Keywise Capital Management, a hedge fund, such firms account for about 75-80% of profit in Chinese industry (see chart 2) and 90% in non-financial services. Jun Yeop Lee of Inha University, in South Korea, calculates that enterprises not majority-owned by the state contribute about 70% of GDP, assuming that they account for all agricultural output and two-thirds of services. The significance of the private sector, though, lies in its vibrancy rather than in precise measures. For a state-directed country, much of China’s success comes from businesses that thrive in large part because they operate outside state control. From nothing It is commonly said that Zhejiang’s greatest contribution to its citizens—and ultimately to China’s economic resurgence—was to provide them with nothing and to cut them off from outside help. The province’s topography comprises mostly mountains and rivers. Until fast trains, highways and airports were built over the past 15 years, access was poor from everywhere except Taiwan. That made it, viewed from Beijing, the wrong place for public investment. As a result, what business did exist was largely private, and meagre in the extreme. Zhejiang’s first successes came in the collection and recycling of four unlikely commodities, says Raymond Ma, who grew up in Wenzhou, the province’s best-known city, and now heads China research for Fidelity, an international fund-management company. These were used packaging, plucked chicken feathers, tattered cotton and spent toothpaste tubes. The cotton, for example, would be picked apart and “refreshed” into new garments. This trade eventually spread beyond the province’s borders and laid the foundations for other, more dynamic businesses. Governors sent from Beijing would invariably begin by attempting to impose state control, but gradually accepted private enterprise as the only way to eke out growth. As China came out of its Maoist gloom, Zhejiang’s scrappy entrepreneurs had already acquired, in the least auspicious circumstances, a culture of opportunity and a belief that anyone could become successful. These would prove to be extremely useful assets. 第 8 页 共 18 页 The anecdotes are almost endless. A Wenzhou businessman who is now ensconced in an office with an elegant address (but no heating) in Shanghai dropped out of high school in the 1980s. A relative lent him 30 yuan (then less than $10) which he paid to an agent for a job in a shoe factory at less than 300 yuan a month. From shoes he went on to electronics, from electronics to selling building materials, from selling building materials to manufacturing them. Today he employs 1,300 people. Another native of Wenzhou, also now in Shanghai (but who chose to meet in a heated coffee shop), left school at 16 and borrowed 360 yuan. That bought two noodle-making machines and a ticket for a 30-hour rail journey to a remote area of China, rumoured to be untapped territory. He sold the machines for 480 yuan. More orders followed. The business grew for six months, and then competition entered: it was time to start again. Selling buttons came next; then trading in scrap that could be used to make them; then factories to produce plastics for buttonmaking (and later for watchmaking). Now he is searching the world for machinery to create the high-grade plastics used in LED screens. The focus on business often came at a high personal cost. A woman who began as a primary-school teacher in Wenzhou on 30 yuan a month moved to a slightly better-paid job in a textile factory. She then became a printer, clothing exporter, property developer and, most recently, wine importer. She is by any measure a tycoon. Along the way she sent her children to Europe when the elder one was ten, to live with a sister who handles overseas sales. The means to support them were in China; their lives would be better in France. China’s entrepreneurs were quick to shift into exports. State-approved trade fairs, notably one in Guangzhou, used to be rare opportunities to meet foreign customers. Now there are many more chances. In 1982 Yiwu, a city on Zhejiang’s northern border, opened a permanent trade centre that in the past dozen years has become popular with foreign buyers. It is one of the largest indoor markets in the world, claiming 140,000 outlets. They line the sides of narrow corridors, their doorways overflowing with bales of wire, crockery, wrenches, lights, cutlery, pens, toys, tools, ornaments for the world’s holidaymakers and even newly manufactured Middle Eastern “antiques”. Across the street are halal restaurants for the many Arab customers. A family multinational The foreigners in Yiwu come to buy; increasingly, the Chinese are going abroad to sell. At the forefront are families like Natasha’s. Natasha lives in southern China with her child and husband, a petroleum engineer. Her sister graduated from a Chinese university and found herself, like many students, jobless but ambitious. In 2004 a Yiwu-like market was opening in Dubai. With Natasha’s help the sister found on the internet a local marble producer, with an annual turnover of 1m yuan, who wanted a Dubai representative. Off the sister went; a younger sister followed later. The family outlet in Dubai added a finishing factory and Natasha’s sisters donned headscarves and whatever other 第 9 页 共 18 页 conservative garments were required to make sales calls to Iran, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. Recently, in response to clients’ requests, marble slabs from Italy have been added to the product line. Another client needed bathrooms and kitchens, 200 units at a time: sourcing those in China became Natasha’s job. Turnover for the Dubai office rose above 100m yuan, fell by half during the financial crisis but then rebounded to a higher level. Within seven years, therefore, a few young Chinese women have created a small, diversified, multinational company. They would not consider themselves unusual. There are now more than 4,000 Chinese enterprises selling through the Dubai Dragon Mart; many of them have expanded their operations to Africa and Latin America. The capital mystery Like any growing venture, China’s private businesses need capital, and in much bigger amounts than 30 yuan for a job agent or 360 yuan for a couple of noodle machines. Its sources are a bit of a mystery: largely unofficial, even secretive. Very little seems to come from the big, state-owned banks, although China’s government has made increasingly loud noises about small firms’ need for finance. Loans to small and medium-sized enterprises comprise 4% or less of the total made by three of the country’s four largest banks, according to company reports. A few other smaller institutions have begun to emerge. Zhejiang Tailong Commercial Bank, a privately owned lender, has grown at a rate of more than 40% a year making smallish loans (averaging 500,000 yuan, or $76,000). It has imbibed the same entrepreneurial spirit as its clientele, employing workers in two shifts to maintain office hours of 7.30am to 7.30pm, seven days a week. But it is an exception. That leaves a huge gap, which has been filled by an unofficial system that is discerning, vibrant and (depending on the authorities’ sentiment of the moment) even illegal. According to research by China’s central bank cited by China Daily, a state-run, English language newspaper, 89% of Wenzhou’s population and 57% of its enterprises have borrowed outside the banking system, paying interest rates of 10% for 30 days or 214% for a year. (Established businesses say rates of 1.5-2% a month are common.) Although the scope of this form of finance is not known, a Wenzhou businessman reckons that there are 100,000 people in his city who could each raise up to 1 billion yuan within 48 hours. So liquid is the system that, unlike private-equity groups in the West, Chinese partnerships often do not raise money before seeking prospective investments; investments are found and then partnerships are formed in short order. A Westerner with family ties in Fujian province, to the south of Zhejiang, says he is constantly presented with opportunities. He rejects many of them, most recently one in importing second-hand women’s handbags (because criminals may have been involved) and another in exporting hair extensions to Japan (too complicated), but he has embraced others, notably in coal (which doubled his money in a year). The system is entirely informal. Records, he says, are minimal and all investments are in cash. A by-product is a proliferation of vast steel safes in homes and offices. 第 10 页 共 18 页 This freedom from financial bureaucracy should not be underestimated. Transactions can unfold at breathtaking speed. Within three months, this Westerner said, his relatives had been involved in the purchase of one steel mill and, in a separate deal, the sale of another. Businesses can be created or liquidated overnight. Rather than pay taxes, he adds, many companies make nominal payments to the local government. This is particularly true of Chinese based abroad, who move quickly from one country to another as opportunities, often tied to Chinese exports, arise. Nevertheless, this form of business has inherent limits. To the extent that firms operate outside the law, they are vulnerable to shakedowns from local officials and mood-swings in Beijing. Although success brings praise, too much of it can invite envy and scrutiny. Each new list compiled of China’s greatest tycoons is often accompanied by stories about those on earlier lists who later fell foul of the law. In his remarks last year Mr Zheng, the provincial party official, said that the significance of private business was not understood: businessmen were often criticised (perhaps a veiled reference to being jailed) without good reason and if continually squeezed, would emigrate, sapping China’s vitality. The prospect of expropriation undermines the willingness of these entrepreneurs to make the long-term investment needed to develop brands, novel products and capable middle-management. One method used to bring private companies into the mainstream appears to be the sale of shares in a public offering. In the West, offerings of shares on a stock exchange are used to raise capital, to provide cash to the initial investors, to create a currency to buy other companies and perhaps to provide independent valuations and external discipline. All this may be true in China too. But share offerings play another essential role: they legitimise a company. Before an offering, it is not uncommon for a company to fail on any number of legal standards. It may not have full title to the land on which its factories sit. It has almost certainly avoided taxes. The process begins with bringing accounts into conventional forms, repaying taxes or paying for the land. The money for this, says an experienced banker, often comes from a “pre-IPO” offering to a small group of investors. These are perceived to be hugely lucrative to financial institutions, but vital to issuers. The resulting company is then deemed clean enough to pass a rigorous government inspection. Share sales usually happen only once: secondary offers, though common in other countries, are rare. According to Mr Liu and Mr Siu, listed private companies continue to be more profitable than listed state-owned enterprises. However, their returns on equity are nothing like as good as those of unlisted private firms. This not only underscores the importance of China’s upstart businessmen, but also raises questions about how Chinese enterprise will evolve. It is possible that returns dip simply because companies use share issues to load up on capital, and hence overcapitalise themselves and depress returns on equity, at least in the short term. It is also possible that they go public only when their best days are past. Another, more pessimistic, possibility is that as the Chinese private sector grows, comes under scrutiny and adopts commonly accepted structures, its vitality will diminish. 第 11 页 共 18 页 It is often said in China that a new economic era has recently begun, described as guo jin min tui: state advances, private retreats. The government has reasons for such a change: it is tightening laws, building infrastructure and providing strategic guidance it considers necessary for the country’s next steps. Many in the West applaud the expansion of the government’s sway, believing in the wisdom of the state in pushing China’s economy forward. But behind China’s remarkable success has been an odd and often unappreciated experiment in laissez-faire capitalism. The post-earthquake nuclear crisis The Japan syndrome THE precise details of what has gone wrong at the nuclear power plants in north-eastern Japan following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck the area on March 11th remain hazy. But a picture is beginning to emerge as events unfold and information is made available by the plants' operators and the Japanese authorities. Start with the basics. Nuclear energy is produced by atomic fission. A large atom (uranium or plutonium) breaks into two smaller ones, releasing energy and neutrons. These neutrons may then trigger the break-up of further atoms, creating a chain reaction. The faster the neutron, the fewer break-ups it provokes. This is because an incoming neutron has to be captured to provoke fission, and fast neutrons are harder to capture. As a result, the chain reaction will peter out unless the neutrons can be slowed down sufficiently. There also need to be enough fissionable atoms about for the neutrons to bump into—in other words, a critical mass. That is why uranium fuel has to be enriched, for only one of the two naturally occurring isotopes of the metal is fissile, and it is much the rarer of the two. In water-cooled reactors like the ones at Fukushima, the right combination of slow neutrons and enriched fuel leads to a self-sustaining process which produces energy that can be used to boil water, make steam and drive a turbine to generate electricity. Besides cooling the fuel (and thus producing the steam) the water also acts as a so-called moderator, slowing down the neutrons and keeping the reaction going. So what happens when things cease to run smoothly, as when an earthquake interferes with the plant's systems? When designing reactors, engineers attempt to achieve what they call “defence in depth”. The idea is that if any specific defence fails, another will make good the shortfall. This is a principle that Fukushima Dai-ichi, the worst hit of the nuclear plants, has been testing to destruction. The defences have failed badly at all three of the reactors which were running at the time the earthquake hit. Some defences are simply barriers. The pellets of nuclear fuel are encased in hard alloys based on zirconium (which lets neutrons pass freely through), to make fuel rods. The reactor core which includes these rods, and the water it sits in, are contained within a thick steel pressure vessel. That, in turn, sits within a larger steel structure, the primary containment vessel. Around all this sits the steel and concrete of the secondary containment structure. 第 12 页 共 18 页 Other defences are actions, rather than things, some of them automatic and some of them not. The first action to be taken in the case of an earthquake is an emergency shutdown, which is achieved by thrusting control rods that sit below the reactor up into the reactor’s core. These rods, made of neutron-absorbing materials such as boron, mop up excess neutrons and quench the chain reaction. However, there are other nuclear reactions in a core that do not depend on neutrons. Some byproducts of the nuclear fission are themselves radioactive. These decay, producing heat. Though that heat is but a fraction of a reactor’s normal power—about 3%, in the case of the Fukushima machines—it is still similar to what comes out of a commercial jet engine operating at full throttle. That can warm things up pretty quickly in the absence of a cooling system. So, the next action needed is to get a set of pumps running to keep cool water flowing into the reactor vessel and the consequent steam coming out. This seems to have happened according to plan, thanks to back-up diesel generators. At Fukushima Dai-ni, Fukushima Dai-ichi’s sister plant about 11 kilometres away, there were problems with some of the cooling systems. These, though, have been put to rest and the plant is now fully shut down. At Fukushima Dai-ichi, meanwhile, the generators and the power system they drove did not survive the tsunami, which hit about an hour after the earthquake and was much larger than the designers had been told to prepare for. Among the problems was the fact that crucial electrical switching equipment was in a basement, and therefore got flooded. Attempts to get the cooling system working with batteries and generators brought in from elsewhere were insufficient, and without a flow of coolant, the cores of the three reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi began to heat up. More heat means more steam and less water in the reactor vessel. If the water level drops far enough, the fuel rods of the reactor proper, which are meant to stay submerged, will be exposed to the steam and other gases. That means they heat up even more quickly, possibly beyond the temperature they can cope with. The fuel rods' zirconium casings then begin to react with the steam. This produces, among other things, hydrogen gas. Also, the contents of the rods and then the rods themselves begin to melt. This appears to have happened in the Fukushima reactors. On Saturday Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency reported that the temperature inside one reactor reached a staggering 2,700?C and the pressure shot up above 8 atmospheres (compared with the 4 atmospheres experienced during normal operation). To prevent the containment vessel from cracking or blowing open altogether, releasing a cloud of radioactive smoke into the air, the plant's operators vented some of the steam and hydrogen, bringing the pressure down to a more comfortable 5.5 atmospheres. Steam, contaminated with some radioactive elements, flowed out of the pressure vessel and into the larger containment vessel that surrounds it. This primary containment vessel looks like an old-fashioned light bulb turned upside down and balanced on top of a doughnut. The reactor's pressure vessel is a cylinder suspended in the light bulb’s neck. The doughnut contains a large reservoir of water, and steam released into the containment vessel is meant to end up condensed in that reservoir. This, though, seems not to have happened as it was meant to. 第 13 页 共 18 页 Pressure built up in the primary containment, too, and it seems that the operators then released steam laced with hydrogen into the secondary containment structures—in other words, the building housing the reactor—first in unit one, then in unit three. In both cases, that release was followed by an explosion when something sparked the hydrogen. (It is also possible that the hydrogen did not come from the reactors at all; there are various uses for hydrogen in such plants and it may have been some of this which exploded.) The explosions were spectacular and unnerving, but were also, like the venting, better than the alternative. The secondary containment is meant to lose its roof if there is a blast within it, because otherwise such a blast will do more damage to the primary containment. With the primary containment vessel of unit one still too full of steam, the radical decision was made to flood it with seawater. This greatly increased the amount of water available to soak up the heat, and should have made sure that the reactor was fully covered by water and thus not hot enough to damage itself any further. The seawater was also laced with boric acid, to soak up stray neutrons that the control rods missed. This treatment is, among other things, a death warrant for the reactors. Such flooding soils them to the point of rendering them useless. The flooding has other disadvantages, too. Radioactive steam will still bubble up to the top of the water in the containment vessel, but will be harder to vent as the systems for doing so in an orderly manner are now underwater. And should the containment vessel spring a leak, then some of the water, containing radioactive debris, may flow out and contaminate other parts of the site. At unit three the plant managers decided to flood only the pressure vessel hanging in the neck of the containment vessel, not the whole of the primary containment. At unit two, the decision was apparently made to put seawater only into the reactor vessel, but the intervention went awry. At some point, the entire reactor inside the pressure vessel was above the waterline: the kettle had boiled dry. After that, in the early morning of Tuesday 15th, there were reports of possible explosions within the building and damage to the doughnut at the base of the primary containment. It seems likely that this unit, unlike the other two, may have suffered significant damage to its primary containment. If this is the case, there may be widespread contamination at the site. It could have been worse. If the zirconium melts, the fuel pellets embedded in it can melt, too, sinking to the bottom of the pressure vessel. If enough molten fuel gathers this way, a critical mass may be assembled, reigniting the fission reaction. The fuel could also burn through the vessel and start forcing radioactive steam continuously into the sky and spreading it around. (The fire within the reactor core at Chernobyl, which had only token containment, did this quite effectively.) This set of events is often referred to as a meltdown, though the word is not recognised as a term of art by the nuclear industry or its regulators. So far, this most dramatic turn of events has not come to pass. The levels of radioactivity recorded around the site are high, but are unlikely to do great harm beyond it. Unlike Chernobyl, there is no obvious mechanism for spreading the damage at Fukushima Dai-ichi, though there could be 第 14 页 共 18 页 further explosions if, on melting, the red-hot fuel hits a body of cold water and vaporises it explosively. But though the reactors themselves cannot burn, other parts of the plant can and have—and that seems to have produced the most severe radiation hazard yet. On March 15th a fire started in the building housing reactor 4, possibly as a result of further hydrogen leaks. The reactor currently contains no fuel (like two more reactors at the plant, it was off line for maintenance when the quake struck) but there is spent fuel in storage tanks in the building. The fire is thought to have got to this fuel, which should have been entirely submerged, but may well not have been. Spent fuel tanks in the other buildings may also have been damaged by the hydrogen explosions. In response to this, when the fire was out the plant's owners, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, evacuated all personnel other than those involved in seawater pumping. This decision seems to have been prompted by the fact that in the aftermath of the fire, the radiation levels outside the plant became truly dangerous for the first time, and within—where there had already been a number of casualties—things had got even worse. Background radiation delivers the average person a radiation dose of about 3 millisieverts (mSv) a year. In Europe and America, workers at nuclear plants are meant to receive at most 50mSv a year. People outside the plants should receive less than 1mSv a year on top of their background dose. On March 15th the plant reported a dose at the perimeter of 11.9mSv an hour (though this dropped back to 6mSv), meaning a worker’s maximum permitted dose for a year would be exceeded in a single shift. Inside the plant higher levels have been noted, with monitors between the buildings reporting cumulative doses of up to 400mSv. The immediate vicinity of the plant, out to 20 kilometres, has been evacuated. People between 20 and 30 kilometres away are being urged to stay in their homes. Radiation has been detected further afield than this, but at low levels. In general, experiencing radiation levels a few times higher than background for a few hours is not considered harmful. That said, there is every likelihood of further releases—and it is impossible completely to rule out large ones if the situation at unit two worsens. According to the International Atomic Energy Ageny, all three reactors have now been flooded with seawater. The pressure in the pressure vessels and containments of reactors one and two is reported to be stable. A release of pressure from the containment vessel of number 2 reactor appears to be planned. The status of the various spent fuel stashes is not clear, which is disturbing. In the end they may contribute more contamination to the environment, especially that beyond the immediate vicinity, than the reactors themselves. It is too early to say how Fukushima fared with the calamity, all things considered. Much of the damage seems to have been caused by the tsunami wrecking the diesel generators—a single failure that resulted in a series of others, and was, in turn, compounded by them. Surely, though, planning for such contingencies can reasonably be considered part and parcel of the technology writ large. And this failed on too many fronts. Switching rooms were flooded. Auxiliary power systems failed. And that is before the full extent of the damage suffered by the reactors is known 第 15 页 共 18 页 for sure. True, in accordance with safety regulations, these were designed to withstand tremors of magnitude 8.2. That they survived relatively unscathed through a magnitude 9.0 earthquake—ie, one that, given the scale's logarithmic nature, was approximately 15 times more powerful—seems remarkable. But an expensive installation was ruined, lives were lost and hazardous levels of radiation leaked into the atmosphere. If no further harm is done, an amount of damage comparatively small when set against the many thousands of lives lost across all affected areas might be seen as a victory—but hardly one to celebrate. Tablet computers The iPad's (and Steve Jobs's) second coming WHEN the iPad was launched last year, it was dubbed “the Jesus tablet” because of the quasi-religious fervour with which it was greeted by consumers worldwide, who have since snapped up more than 15m of them. Now Apple wants to create even more converts. On March 2nd Steve Jobs, its boss, returned briefly from sick leave to introduce the iPad 2, a revamped version that will compete with a host of rivals now coming to market. Among these are devices such as Motorola’s Xoom that are based on a new version of Google’s Android operating system designed specifically for tablets. Android-based smartphones have rapidly eroded the market share of Apple’s popular iPhone. But when it comes to tablets, the iPad’s lead should prove more durable. For a start, Apple has had the tablet field to itself for a year, allowing it to refine its offering and raise the bar for rivals. The iPad 2 is considerably thinner, lighter and faster than its predecessor and offers videoconferencing and other capabilities whose absence in the first iPad were widely criticised. Another reason to bet Apple will maintain its lead is that rivals with similar capabilities have turned out more expensive, whereas the new iPad, despite its extra features, will cost the same as the old one. In America the Xoom costs $800 without a wireless contract and $600 with a two-year one from Verizon. The cheapest iPad 2 will cost $499 without a contract. Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester, a research firm, reckons high prices will prove fatal for these rivals. Apple has other advantages too, such as an online store full of software programmes, or apps, designed for iPads, as well as content that can be downloaded to them. Yet the closed nature of such stores also makes some people hesitate to buy tablets. In a recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), more than 80% of American respondents said being able to access content from anywhere would be an important factor in their choice of e-reader or tablet. John Rose of BCG reckons Apple’s iTunes music store succeeded because it had to strike deals with only the handful of firms that dominate the record business; it will be far harder to reach exclusive agreements with the diverse owners of the many other types of content tablet users might buy. That is unlikely to stop Apple from trying, though. Mr Jobs is a notorious control freak. He is also 第 16 页 共 18 页 a tech visionary whose notion of tablet computing has delivered yet another smash hit for Apple. The father of the Jesus tablet is no doubt already planning his next miracle. Japan's stricken nuclear plant Watching the smoke A SURGE in the radiation levels surrounding the reactors at the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant at Fukushima on Wednesday morning forced authorities to withdraw workers from the site of Japan’s escalating nuclear catastrophe. A skeleton crew of 50, these are the staff who had been left behind to shut down the plants’ still-operating reactors, before their cores submit to a chaotic deterioration. Till Tuesday there had been another 750 working with them. After being called away, the remaining 50 returned to their desperate tasks only one hour later, as the intensity of radiation at their workstations subsided somewhat. Their brief absence gave the appearance that the unfolding disaster, which they have been struggling to manage, may have slipped completely beyond their control. At the time of the workers’ withdrawal, some part or parts of the plant were emitting 10 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation per hour. In an American nuclear plant, workers are allowed to be exposed to no more than 50mSv in a year. At 10mSv per hour, any given worker would have exceeded that yearly maximum within a single shift. By 11.30am however the level dropped dramatically, and mysteriously, to about 6mSv per hour and the workers were back to the job. The exact cause of the increased rate of emission—even its specific location—is unknown; it may have been due to a leak from radioactive substances stored at the No. 2 reactor, but there were any number of other possible sources among the plant’s six reactors. An unrelenting series of fires and explosions of pent-up hydrogen gas have complicated the situation at the Dai-ichi reactor immensely. Babbage summarises the series of internal disasters and MIT is producing a running and highly readable commentary. Hours earlier this morning a plume of white smoke (or possibly steam) was seen rising off one of the plant’s reactors. The government’s chief spokesman, the cabinet secretary Yukio Edano, told a televised press conference that the smoke was due to a fire at the site’s No. 3 reactor (pictured above, to the left; there was also a fire at No. 4, on the right) and that there was a real danger that the reactor’s containment vessel had been damaged. Mr Edano said there was however no present need to expand Fukushima’s evacuation area. The smoke itself subsided without explanation. People who remain within a radius of 20 kilometres of the site have been ordered to leave and those living between 20-30km away instructed to stay indoors, so as to avoid radioactive contamination. About 140,000 people are thought to be living in this zone. As an additional measure, everyone who was within 3 kilometres of Fukushima’s other nuclear power plant, Dai-ni—which has been shut down completely and without leaking—were asked today to leave the area. Sight of those plumes at Dai-ichi was especially frightening. The prospect of airborne particulate matter floating away from Fukushima is of immediate concern to many of the millions of people 第 17 页 共 18 页 who are watching Mr Edano’s statements. Meanwhile panic itself has become the thing to watch for in Tokyo. Radiation levels in the capital did multiply tenfold during the past day, though they remain far below any dangerous level and almost immeasurably lower than at the burning plant. Since then, mercifully, the prevailing winds along Japan’s stricken north-eastern coastline have turned towards the Pacific, diminishing the risk that could at some point be posed by radioactive particles escaping from the compromised plant at Fukushima, 260 kilometres away. In Tokyo different communities are responding in different ways. A fresh earthquake on a different fault line, with its epicentre off Shizuoka, near Tokyo, had a magnitude of 6.0—enough to terrify people living in most of the planet’s seismic zones, if not the Japanese—and did nothing to settle nerves. But it was with nuclear anxieties in mind that France’s prime minister released a statement on Wednesday urging French nationals in Tokyo to consider leaving immediately, for the south of Japan if not from the country itself. Austria moved its embassy to Osaka, to the south-west, as have a number of private international firms. The Western tabloid press has claimed to see a “mass exodus” from Tokyo, but apart from some expats there seem to be very few Tokyoites inclined to flee abroad. Indeed, in an impressive display of discipline, healthy-sized droves turned out for the annual tax-filing day on Tuesday. Panic-buying on the other hand has become a real concern. The government is calling on ordinary citizens not to hoard fuel or food, as shelves and inventories around the country go bare. The sort of hour-by-hour fear and speculation that have surrounded the dynamic situation in Fukushima have obstructed the world’s view of the vast human toll already exacted by the disaster that began last Friday afternoon, March 11th. First the massive 9.0 earthquake and then the tsunami it launched: the effects of that initial disastrous day claimed at least 3,771 lives, according to today’s official estimate, and left another 7,843 people missing. Many of the missing are presumed to have been washed out to sea from low-lying coastal areas. The distracting worry of a meltdown at Fukushima is having terrible consequences for hundreds of thousands or even millions of the people who live in Honshu island's northern extent, Tohoku. Massive disruptions to the country's petrol supplies have left communities in the north without access to food. Vehicles have run dry and, six days in, a huge part of population is starting to go hungry. Even where supermarkets and storehouses are well stocked, fuel is required to deliver goods the final mile they must travel to the people who need it most. This is felt most acutely in Fukushima's "exclusion zone", whose residents have been commanded to stay in their shelters—and where lorry-drivers are afraid or unable to reach them. Japan now has 80,000 rescue workers up and down the affected area, doing their best to rush aid to those who are stranded, hungry, thirsty and in need of emergency medical care. A late-winter snowfall is bringing misery of its own, with temperatures dropping and expected to stay below freezing overnight. 第 18 页 共 18 页