Waves From a Slowing China Will Break on All Our Shores

choi

Henny Sender, Waves From a Slowing China Will Break on All Our Shores. Financial Times, Dec 9, 2011 (a columnist).

Quote:

"On November 18, the great and good of the New York financial community flocked to the drawing room of the NY Palace Hotel to attend a lunch given by Chinese brokerage CICC in honour of the former vice-prime minister, Zeng Peiyang, and a senior delegation of Chinese leaders such as Lou Jiwei, chairman of China Investment Corp.

"The Chinese message was stark according to multiple guests: if your Congress passes a bill labelling us as currency manipulators, we will crush you. And because we find your government rather difficult to deal with, please convey that message on our behalf.

"The Chinese take great exception to the suggestion that they are the only ones trying to keep their currency cheap when, in their eyes, most of the world is playing that game. * * * They [Chinese] believe the euro was designed as a way to keep German industry competitive because if there was no euro, the D-mark would have appreciated and Greeks and Italians (and Chinese) would no longer have been able to afford to drive sleek Mercedes and BMW cars.

"The Chinese sense of resentment is also fuelled by a growing sense of confidence in the government's own macro=management skills. [The author lists a litany of China's economy facing a hard landing: manufacturing index dropping into hegative territory, rising labor cost, export slowing down, closed factories, and plummeting real estate.] That sense of concern is not evident in Beijing. China has seen the emerging markets of Asia seize up in the late nineties, with little impact on its [China]s] own well-being. Japan has been losing ground for two decades. The global financial crisis of 2008 suggested that the US model was deeply flawed, its growth dependent on debt that came largely from Beijing itself. Now, with Europe in recession, many Chinese feel that their system has proved far superior to those of any of its competitors.

"Still, the world should not take too much pleasure from a slowing China. A slowing China means * * * (as [China]s] officials later suggested in private meetings around that lunch) fewer buy orders for the rest of the world's debt. If China slows, it may well be more of a problem for the rest of the world than for China itself.


Note:
(a) I guess the title means a slowing China will impact/affect US, rather than have insignicant effects on US--at least according to Beijing, in words passed along in or around that lunch.
(b) seize up: "phrasal verb INFORMAL to stop being able to move or work in the normal way
<The washing machine totally seized up on Thursday.>
<The traffic had seized up for miles because of the roadworks.>"
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus. Cambridge University Press, undated.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/seize-up