actually,history buff, there are more speakers of Chinese languages then English. For that, matter, you claim to be a history buff and boast of American power being used to keep the world free. Please explain how funding a military revolt against a legitimate-and DEMOCRATIC-election Chile advanced the cause of freedom. For that matter, please explain why we occupied Nicarauga for twelve years, why we wound up with colonies in the Phillipines, Cuba, Guam, The Virgin Islands, Samoa and Puerto Rico; why we looked the other way as various dictators like Mobuto,Marcos and Somoza looted their countires and tortured their own citizens or why we sent american agents to South America to teach better torutre techniques to the police. Or why we can see pictures of Donald Rumsfield and Dick Chney next to Saddam Hussein when he was willing to go after Iran with our blessing or how we trained and armed the Islamic militias in Afghanistan when they fought the Soviet Union-that's right we armed and trained the Taliban and their good friend, Osama Bin Laden. Well we did perfect the Atomic Bomb. Technoloical innovations are made all over the world, you self-righteous chauvinist. Try actually reading a history book and making statements that sound like a fifth grader.
China’s Secret Growth Engine
Where the savvy entrepreneurs of Zhejiang province go, the rest of China may soon follow.
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Like a growing number of Chinese manufacturers hit by rising wages, Wang Jianping recently packed up his plant and machinery on China's east coast and headed west, where cheaper labor helps offset rising inflation and withering competition. Unlike most of his rivals, though, Wang didn't stop at China's borders. He pushed as far west as Nigeria, where the shoemaker from Zhejiang—a bustling province of 44 million people—has been doing a robust trade since 2004. "We have a very successful operation," says Wang, whose Hassan Shoe Manufacture Co. exports shoes to more than a hundred countries. "Business has never been better."
Leave it to a Zhejiang native to pioneer outsourcing in a country still known for its limitless supply of peasant labor. When it comes to trailblazing more efficient ways to make money, Zhejiang province has always been ahead of the rest of Chinese business. By the time China was getting comfortable with economic reform in the late 1980s, Zhejiang was investing overseas and trading equity stakes in private companies—albeit underground—unfettered by central government meddling.
Once neglected by the state, Zhejiang is now hailed by economists for its bottom-up model of development and fearless regard for the global economy. It's also being watched as a bellwether for the Chinese economy: in recent months, Zhejiang investors have cashed out of frothy Chinese markets, bought into a record number of Western businesses and moved up the business food chain from making simple goods to providing sophisticated Internet services. In October, one of Zhejiang's former provincial governors, Xi Jingping, was named heir apparent to the national party leadership at the Communist Party Congress. He's encouraging the rest of the country to follow the Zhejiang model.
In fact, Zhejiang is less a preplanned model than an organic byproduct of necessity. Sealed off by an enveloping mountain range to the west and by the East China Sea to the east, the province was written off during the cold war as the front line of an American attack, and thus starved of resources by Beijing. "We had no choice but to turn to private business both here and abroad," says Ma Jinlong, director of the People's Government Economic Research Center in Wenzhou, Zhejiang's commercial capital. "As late as the 1970s, few of the provinces had any good business sense but we've always had it."
While much of the rest of China is still run by state bureaucracies, nearly three quarters of the economic output and more than half of the tax revenue in Zhejiang comes from private enterprise. Small to midsize enterprises dominate, funded by an elaborate underground banking network, with a default rate near zero (borrowers tend not to back out on neighbors). Ironically, the underground banking system has made corporate financing far more open than in other provinces, where loans are typically arranged through opaque state banks.
Zhejiang is still home to the world manufacturing capitals for buttons, socks, dyes and textiles, but now it is also going high tech. While Zhejiang is no Silicon Valley, R&D investment in private industry last year grew by 47 percent over 2005, and the value of high-tech companies as a percentage of total industry increased by 26 percent. Alibaba, the e-commerce company that recently launched a $1.5 billion IPO, was founded in 1999 in Zhejiang.
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