Brasil e China no Reordenamento das Relações ... - Funag

albert keidel
A variation on this policy continuum is China’s post-crisis efforts to
favor development of local, purely Chinese, inventions and processes.
While what China calls “indigenous innovation” may appear clumsy and
strong-arm to outsiders at times, it has in general moderated after meeting
international criticisms for its excesses. One way to view both China’s
post-crisis innovation and strategic sector strategies is as an attempt to
move away from the “putting out” import-assembly-for-export mode
of manufacturing, by which ownership of all major technical content
remains in foreign hands. China wants to increase its long-run share of
core manufacturing technology ownership, and its growth success in the
financial crisis helped speed up its efforts in this direction.
The crisis’ more direct impact on its over-developed assembly trade
was the crisis-driven collapse of that trade and the resulting shift by a
wide range of companies away from selling so much abroad to finding
more markets at home and product lines supplying those home markets.
In this direct way, the crisis confirmed the view that China’s assemblytrade
bubble was caused not by excess Chinese savings but by excess
foreign demand fueled by deregulated U.S. domestic credit expansion.
The adjustment was painful for certain sectors and mainland locations,
but the effect of the crisis was a shift for China’s economic structure in
a healthier long-run direction.
A second direct impact of the crisis to speed up China’s development
was the stimulus program’s pattern of taking major infrastructure projects
originally planned for several years later and moving them forward to
2009 and 2010. A prime example is high-speed rail, but other examples
abound at both national and local levels. This accelerated implementation
of such a wide range of public investment projects provided a foundation
for the accelerated post-crisis expansion of private sector production and
commerce already noted.
In a different dimension, accelerated financial sector reforms were
also a result of China’s crisis response. When China’s bank-financed
stimulus program had become so successful that inflation became a
concern in late 2009 and early 2010, central authorities started restricting
bank credit in traditional ways. Banks’ response was to expand a range of
innovations involving trust companies and “off-balance-sheet” activities
by which banks arranged direct borrowing and lending between large
institutions without having the funds pass through the banks’ accounting
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