US firms operating in China (#125; Topic B)

At the World Affairs Forum on "China Today" (#122-4), I was expected to discuss US-China economic relations. For this segment, I prepared several viewgraphs designed to counter the misleading argument, popular in the US media, that China closed her door to international competition to the detriment of US companies. One shows the number of US firms operating in China grew from 23 (with investment totalling $120 million) in 1980 to some 49,000 (with investment totalling $51 billion) in 2005. (Data are from a report by China's National Development and Reform Commission, quoted in Wall Street Journal, 4/18/06). On another, I was able to draw from a 4/20/06 interview of GM's CEO over CNBC. In it, he stated that China opened the door to GM a decade ago, while Japan and South Korea, to this day, limit their domestic auto manufacturing to domestic companies. (The World Bank group had set up a joint venture in China involving French auto maker Peugoet about a decade before GM's entry; I was personally involved as a WB staff member.) He added that GM has a 17% share of the Chinese market, #1 among foreign car manufacturers, and that, while GM had an overall loss of some $10 billion last year, its segment in China was profitable in 2005. I was also able to quote, from a recently published book on China (by researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and reviewed in the Economist 4/22/06) that "America is about $70 billion a year richer as a result of trading with China, despite painful job losses in unskilled industries."