美国时代周刊文章：美国应向中国学习5件事

美媒：中国5方面 堪奥巴马借镜
　　奥巴马即将抵达中国，展开上任后首次访华行程。两国无论在文化、社会以至政治制度都存在极大差异，但美国《时代周刊》日前发表文章，指奥巴马此行可以从5大方面学习中国经验。
　　《时代周刊》称，奥巴马首先可以学习中国的雄心壮志，即是中国在发展经济上的进取态度，时刻抱着“我能做得到”的精神。尽管一些经济学家质疑中国投放太多资源，发展这类造价高昂的项目，但中国却是充满前进的动力，用“勇往直前”来形容是最贴切不过。
　　第二，中国推动教育不遗余力，民众也十分好学。事实上，在数十载投资于教育后，中国的识字率现已超过90%，比美国的86%更高，一些偏远的农村儿童也获得接受教育的机会。
　　第三，中国人重视孝道，把照顾父母视作必然。美国人惯了把年迈父母送入护老院，中国人看在眼里感到难以接受，视为重大耻辱。按照中国传统，父母养育子女，子女长大后照顾父母是理所当然的事。
　　第四，奥巴马访华其中一项任务，就是游说中国人作更多消费，希望他们能仿效美国人的消费模式。但“积谷防饥”的观念，正是美国要从中国学习的一课。

以下是文章的原文，汉语注释系本人的生词部分，使用金山词霸中的汉语解释，部分解释可能不对。请网友仅欣赏原文。

On the evening of Nov. 15, President Barack Obama, the youthful leader of one of the world's youngest countries, begins his first visit to China, among the world's most ancient societies. Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, have much to discuss. Nukes in Iran and North Korea. China's surging military spending. Trade imbalances. Climate change.

But the visit comes at an awkward尴尬、棘手 moment for the U.S. China, despite its 5,000-year burden of history, has emerged as a dynamo发电机 of optimism, experimentation and growth. It has defied the global economic slump萧条, and the sense that it's the world's ascendant上升的 power has never been stronger. The U.S., by contrast, seems suddenly older and frailer脆弱的. America's national mood is still in a funk惊慌, its economy foundering陷落, its red-vs.-blue politics as rancorous怀恶意的 as ever. The U.S. may be one of the world's oldest capitalist countries and China one of the youngest, but you couldn't blame Obama if he leaned over弯曲，倾身 to Hu at some point and asked, "What are you guys doing right?"

Could the world's lone but weary萎靡的 superpower actually learn something from China?
It's a politically incorrect question, of course.
China is an authoritarian nation; its ruling Communist Party deals ruthlessly with any challenge to its hegemony统治. It remains, relatively speaking, a poor, developing country with huge problems to confront, massive corruption and environmental degradation退化，恶化 being Nos. 1 and 1a.
Still, this is a moment of humility卑躬屈膝 for the U.S., and China is doing some important things right. If the U.S. were to ask the Chinese what it could learn from their example, it might gain some insight洞察力 into what it's doing right and wrong. Here are five lessons from China's success story:

1. Be Ambitious
One day this summer, Sean Maloney, an executive vice president at Intel, was bouncing 上上下下from one appointment to another in northeastern China, speeding along in a van 货车traversing newly built highways. He gazed out at one of the world's biggest construction projects: a network of high-speed train lines — covering 10,000 miles (16,000 km) nationwide — that China is building. As far as the eye could see, there sat vast concrete support struts支架, one after another, exactly 246 ft. (75 m) apart. Each was full of steel cables钢丝绳 and weighed about 800 tons. "We used to build stuff too," Maloney mused深思, unprompted自发的. "But now it's NIMBY [not in my backyard] every time you try to do something. Here,'' he joked, "it's more like IMBY. There's stuff happening here, everywhere and always."

It's not just NIMBYism that constrains限制约束 the U.S. these days, of course. America is close to tapped out敲出 financially, with budget deficits this year and next exceeding $1 trillion and forecast to remain above $500 billion through 2019. But sometimes the country seems tapped out in terms of vision and investment for the future.

Some economists believe that given its stage of development, China spends too much on expensive items like high-speed rail lines. But step back from the individual infrastructure projects and the debates about whether a given investment is necessary, and what's palpable可触知的 in China is the sense of forward motion, of energy. No foreigner — at least not one I've met in five years of living here — even bothers denying it. And the Chinese take it for granted.

When a brand-new six-lane highway opened in suburban Shanghai in October, Zhong Li Ping, who shuttles穿梭 migrant workers民工 to the city and back to their hometowns, said, "I don't know what took them so long." In truth, it took about two years — roughly the time it would take to get the environmental and other regulatory permits for a new highway in the U.S. If, that is, you could get them at all.
There's no direct translation into Chinese of the phrase can-do spirit. But yong wang zhi qian 勇往直前probably suffices. Literally, it means "march forward courageously."

China has — and has had for years now — a can-do spirit that's unmistakable不会误解的. Americans know the phrase well. They invented it. It used to define them.

Critics of the authoritarian Chinese government would say it's a system more accurately called "can do — or else."

And they have a point. No one in the U.S. would argue that it should adopt China's dictatorial style of government. America doesn't need to displace tens of thousands of people in order to build a massive dam, as China did in Hubei province from 1994 to 2006. (The value of checks and balances相互制衡 is, in fact, among the many things China could learn from the U.S.)
But you don't have to be a card-carrying持有会员证的正式 communist to wonder how effectively the U.S. develops and executes ambitious projects. Ask James McGregor. He's a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and now a business consultant who divides his time between the two countries.

"One key thing we can learn from China is setting goals, making plans and focusing on moving the country ahead as a nation," he says. "These guys have taken the old five-year plans and stood them on their head. Instead of deciding which factory gets which raw materials, which products are made, how they are priced and where they are sold, their planning now consists of 'How do we build a world-class silicon-chip industry in five years? How do we become a global player in car-manufacturing?'"


Some of this is the natural arc of a huge, fast-growing country in the process of modernization. The U.S. in the late 19th century was nothing if not what Intel's Maloney would call an IMBY country. America was ambitious. There's no secret formula to help the nation get back its zeal for what it used to enthusiastically and sincerely call progress. But even though the U.S. is a mature, developed country, many economists believe it has shortchanged少找零钱，投资不足 infrastructure investment for decades. It possibly did so again in this year's stimulus package. Just $144 billion of the $787 billion stimulus bill Congress passed earlier this year went to direct infrastructure spending. According to IHS Global Insight, an economic-consulting firm, U.S. spending on transportation infrastructure will actually decline overall in 2009 when state budgets are factored in — this at a time when the American Society of Civil Engineers contends that the U.S. should invest $1.6 trillion to upgrade its aging infrastructure over the next five years.
When the economic crisis hit China late last year, by contrast, almost half of the emergency spending Beijing approved — $585 billion spread over two years — was directed at projects that accelerated China's massive infrastructure build-out. "That money went into the real economy very quickly," says economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But it's not just emergency spending on bridges, roads and high-speed rail networks that's helping growth in China. Patrick Tam, general partner at Tsing Capital, a venture-capital firm in Beijing, says the government is aggressively helping seed 播种the development of new green-tech industries. An example: 13 of China's biggest cities will have all-electric bus fleets within five years.

"China is eventually going to dominate the industry for electric vehicles," Tam says, "in part because the central government has both the vision and the financial wherewithal必要的资金 to make that happen." Tam, a graduate of MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, says he does deals in Beijing rather than Silicon Valley these days "because I believe this is where these new industries will really take shape. China's got the energy, the drive and the market to do it."
Isn't that the sort of thing venture capitalists used to say about the U.S.?

2. Education Matters
On a recent Saturday afternoon, at a nice restaurant in central Shanghai, Liu Zhi-he sat fidgeting 坐立不安at the table, knowing that it was about time for him to leave. All around him sat relatives from an extended family that had gathered for a momentous 重大的occasion: the 90th birthday of Liu's great-grandmother Ling Shu Zhen, the still spry 充满活力的and elegant matriarch女家长 of a sprawling clan.
But Liu had to leave because it was time for him to go to school. This Saturday, as he does every Saturday, Liu was attending two special classes. He takes a math tutorial家教, and he studies English.
Liu is 7 years old.

A lot of foreigners — and, indeed, a fair number of Chinese — believe that the obsession (and that's the right word) with education in China is overdone. The system stresses rote 死记硬背memorization. It drives kids crazy — aren't 7-year-olds supposed to have fun on Saturday afternoons? — and doesn't necessarily prepare them, economically speaking, for the job market or, emotionally speaking, for adulthood. Add to that the fact that the system, while incredibly competitive, has become corrupt.

All true — and all, for the most part, beside the point. After decades of investment in an educational system that reaches the remotest peasant villages, the literacy识字 rate in China is now over 90%. (The U.S.'s is 86%.) And in urban China, in particular, students don't just learn to read. They learn math. They learn science. As William McCahill, a former deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, says, "Fundamentally, they are getting the basics right, particularly in math and science. We need to do the same. Their kids are often ahead of ours."


What the Chinese can teach are verities事实, home truths that have started to make a comeback in the U.S. but that could still use a push. The Chinese understand that there is no substitute 替代品for putting in the hours and doing the work. And more than anything else, the kids in China do lots of work.

In the U.S., according to a 2007 survey by the Department of Education, 37% of 10th-graders in 2002 spent more than 10 hours on homework each week. That's not bad; in fact, it's much better than it used to be (in 1980 a mere 7% of kids did that much work at home each week).
But Chinese students, according to a 2006 report by the Asia Society, spend twice as many hours doing homework as do their U.S. peers.
Part of the reason is family involvement. Consider Liu, the 7-year-old who had to leave the birthday party to go to Saturday school. Both his parents work, so when he goes home each day, his grandparents are there to greet him and put him through his after-school paces. His mother says simply, "This is normal. All his classmates work like this after school.''

Yes, big corporate employers in China will tell you the best students coming out of U.S. universities are just as bright as and, generally speaking, far more creative than their counterparts from China's élite universities.
But the big hump 隆起的部分in the bell curve 钟型曲线— the majority of the school-age population — matters a lot for the economic health of countries. Simply put, the more smart, well-educated people there are — of the sort that hard work creates — the more economies (and companies) benefit. Remember what venture capitalist Tam said about China and the electric-vehicle industry. A single, relatively new company working on developing an electric-car battery — BYD Co. — employs an astounding 10,000 engineers.

China, critics will point out, doesn't produce (at least not yet) many Nobel Prize winners. But don't think the basic educational competence of the workforce isn't a key factor in its having become the manufacturing workshop of the world. It isn't just about cheap labor; it's about smart labor. "Whether it's line workers or engineers, we're finding the candlepower标准烛光 of our employees here as good as or better than anywhere in the world," says Nick Reilly, a top executive at General Motors in Shanghai. "It all starts with the emphasis families put on the importance of education. That puts pressure on the government to deliver a decent system."

And the Chinese government responds to that pressure in some intriguing 引起好奇心的ways. It insists that primary-school teachers in math and science have degrees in those subjects. (Less than half of eighth-grade math teachers in the U.S. majored in math.) There is a "master teacher" program nationwide that provides mentoring 培训for younger teachers. Zhang Dianzhou, a professor emeritus退休的 of mathematics at East China Normal University in Shanghai who co-chaired a committee charged with redesigning high school mathematics programs across the country, says recent changes have begun to reflect more of a "real-world emphasis." Computer-science courses, for example, have been integrated into the math curriculum for high school students. And China is placing even more importance on teaching young students English and other foreign languages. If you think China's willingness to constantly fine-tune调整 its educational system is not going to have much of an impact 20 years from now, there's a 7-year-old boy in Shanghai who'd be happy to discuss the issue with you. In English.

3. Look After the Elderly
it's hard to imagine two societies that deal with their elderly as differently as the U.S. and China. And I can vouch for担保 that firsthand.

My wife Junling is a Shanghai native, and last month for the first time we visited my father at a nursing home in the U.S. She was shaken by the experience and later told me, "You know, in China, it's a great shame to put a parent into a nursing home."

In China the social contract社会契约 has been straightforward 简单的for centuries: parents raise children; then the children care for the parents as they reach their dotage. 老年
When, for example, real estate developer Jiang Xiao Li and his wife recently bought a new, larger apartment in Shanghai, they did so in part because they know that in a few years, his parents will move in with them. Jiang's parents will help take care of Jiang's daughter, and as they age, Jiang and his wife will help take care of them.
As China slowly develops a better-funded and more reliable social-security system for retirees — which it has begun — the economic necessity of generations living together will diminish a bit. But no one believes that as China gets richer, the cultural norm will shift too significantly.

To a degree, of course, three generations living under one roof has long happened in the U.S., but in the 20th century, America became a particularly mobile and rootless无根的 society. It is hard to care for one's parents when they live three time zones away.

Home care for the elderly will most likely make a comeback恢复 in the U.S. out of sheer十足的 economic necessity, however. The number of elderly Americans will soar from 38.6 million in 2007 to 71.5 million in 2030. But, says Arnold Eppel, who recently retired as head of the department of aging in Baltimore County, Maryland, "There won't be enough spots for them" in the country's overwhelmed nursing-home system. Appreciating the magnitude重要性 of the coming crisis, the U.S. government has begun to respond. Two new initiatives — Nursing Home Diversion and Money Follows the Person — expand subsidies for home elder care, and the Veterans Health Administration has just put in effect its own similar initiative.

"The whole trend will be into home care, because nursing homes are too expensive," Eppel says, noting that nursing-home care in the U.S. costs about $85,000 annually per resident.

In China, senior-care costs are, for the most part, borne by families. For millions of poor Chinese, that's a burden as well as a responsibility, and it unquestionably skews both spending and saving patterns in ways that China needs to change (see Save More, below). For middle-class and rich Chinese, those costs are a more manageable responsibility but one that nonetheless ripples 泛起涟漪through their economic decision-making. Still, there are benefits that balance the financial hardship: grandparents tutor young children while Mom and Dad work; they acculturate适应文化 the youngest generation to the values of family and nation; they provide a sense of cultural continuity that helps bind a society. China needs to make obvious changes to its elder-care system as it becomes a wealthier society, but as millions of U.S. families make the brutal decision about whether to send aging parents into nursing homes, a bigger dose of the Chinese ethos may well be returning to America

4. Save More
You've now heard it so many times, you can probably repeat it in your sleep. President Obama will no doubt make the point publicly when he gets to Beijing: the Chinese need to spend more; they need to consume more; they need — believe it or not — to become more like Americans, for the sake of the global economy.

And it's all true. But the other side of that equation is that the U.S. needs to save more.
For the moment, American households actually are doing so. After the personal-savings rate dipped to zero in 2005, the shock of the economic crisis last year prompted people to snap shut their wallets. Now that it's pouring, in other words, American households have decided to save for a rainy day. The savings rate is currently about 4% and has gone as high as 6% this year.

In China, the household-savings rate exceeds 20%. It is partly for straightforward policy reasons. As we've seen, wage earners are expected to care for not only their children but also their aging parents. And there is, to date, only the flimsiest of publicly funded health care and pension systems, which increases incentives for individuals to save while they are working. But China, like many other East Asian countries, is a society that has esteemed personal financial prudence for centuries. There is no chance that will change anytime soon, even if the government creates a better social safety net and successfully encourages greater consumer spending.

Why does the U.S. need to learn a little frugality? 节俭Because healthy savings rates, including government and business savings, are one of the surest indicators of a country's long-term financial health. High savings lead, over time, to increased investment, which in turn generates productivity gains, innovation and job growth. In short, savings are the seed corn谷物种子 of a good economic harvest.

The U.S. government thus needs to get in on the act as well. By running perennial deficits, it is dis-saving, even as households save more. Peter Orszag, Obama's Budget Director, recently called the U.S. budget deficits unsustainable — this year's is $1.4 trillion — and he's right. To date, the U.S. has seemed unable to have what Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has called an "adult conversation" about the consequences of spending so much more than is taken in. That needs to change. And though Hu Jintao and the rest of the Chinese leadership aren't inclined to lecture visiting Presidents, he might gently hint暗示 that Beijing is getting a little nervous about the value of the dollar — which has fallen 15% since March, in large part because of increasing fears that America's debt load is becoming unmanageable.

That's what happens when you're the world's biggest creditor债权人: you get to drop hints like that, which would be enough by themselves to create international economic havoc毁坏 if they were ever leaked.漏 (Every time any official in Beijing muses publicly about seeking an alternative to the U.S. dollar for the $2.1 trillion China holds in reserve, currency traders have a heart attack.) If Americans became a bit more like the Chinese — if they saved more and spent less, consistently over time — they wouldn't have to worry about all that.

5. Look over the Horizon
The energy that so many outsiders feel when they are in China and that President Obama may see when he is there comes not just from the frenetic 狂热的activity that is visible everywhere. It comes also from a sense that it's harnessed治理 to something bigger. The government isn't frantically 疯狂地building all this infrastructure just to create make-work jobs. And kids aren't studying themselves sleepless because it's a lot of fun.

A few years ago, I interviewed Zhang Xin, a young man from a deeply poor agricultural province in central China. His parents were wheat 小麦farmers and lived in a tiny one-room house next to the fields. He had graduated from Tsinghua University — China's MIT — and gotten a job as a software engineer at Huawei, the Cisco of China. His success, Zhang told me one day, had changed his family forever. None of his descendants would "ever work in the wheat fields again. Not my children. Not their children. That life is over." (And neither would his parents. They moved to prosperous Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, soon after he started his new job.)

Multiply that young man's story by millions, and you get a sense of what a forward-looking country this once very backward society has become. A smart American who lived in China for years and who wants to avoid being identified publicly (perhaps because he'd be labeled a "panda hugger,熊猫拥抱者" the timeworn陈旧的 epithet 词语tossed at anyone who has anything good to say about China) puts it this way:
"China is striving努力奋斗 to become what it has not yet become. It is upwardly上升的 mobile, consciously, avowedly 公然地and — as its track record continues to strengthen — proudly so."

Proudly so, because as Zhang understood, hard work today means a much better life decades from now for those who will inherit what he helped create. And if that sounds familiar to Americans — marooned, for the moment, in the deepest recession in 26 years — it should.