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发帖数: 6723 | 1 http://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20181203/china-rise-series-declining-economy/dual/
The Real China Challenge: Managing Its Decline
BRET STEPHENS
2018年12月3日
中国杭州，阿里巴巴集团园区内的雕塑。
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
In 2009, The Economist wrote about an up-and-coming global power: Brazil.
Its economy, the magazine suggested, would soon overtake that of France or
the U.K. as the world’s fifth largest. Sao Paulo would be the world’s
fifth-richest city. Vast new reserves of offshore oil would provide an added
boost, complemented by the country’s robust and sophisticated
manufacturing sector.
2009年，《经济学人》(The Economist)曾撰文谈论全球大国中的后起之秀：巴西。该
杂志表示，其经济很快将取代法国或英国，成为世界第五大经济体。圣保罗将成为世界
第五富裕的城市。新探明的庞大近海石油储备将提供额外刺激，还有强健、成熟的制造
业作为补充。
To illustrate the point, the magazine’s cover featured a picture of Rio de
Janeiro’s “Christ the Redeemer” statue taking off from its mountaintop as
if it were a rocket.
为说明这一点，这期杂志封面是里约热内卢的救世主基督像如火箭一样从山顶飞起。
The rocket never reached orbit. Brazil’s economy is now limping its way out
of the worst recession in its history. The murder rate — 175 people per
day in 2017 — is at a record high. One former president is in jail, another
was impeached. The incoming president is an admirer of the country’s old
military dictatorship, only he thinks it should have killed the people it
tortured.
这艘火箭从未抵达轨道。巴西的经济如今正艰难地走出该国有史以来最严重的衰退。这
里的谋杀率创下历史新高，2017年每天有175人被杀。一位前总统入狱，另一位遭到弹
劾。即将上任的总统是该国过去的军事独裁统治的崇拜者，只有他认为应当将拷打过的
那些人杀掉。
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first tout as countries of the
future.
上帝要谁灭亡，必先捧其为未来之邦。
I thought about The Economist story while reading a deeply reported and
thought-provoking series in The Times about another country of the future:
China. The phrase “rise of China” has now become so commonplace that we
treat it more as a fact of nature than as a prediction of a very familiar
sort — one made erroneously about the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s;
about Japan in the ’70s and ’80s; and about the European Union in the ’
90s and ’00s.
我是在读《纽约时报》一则系列文章时想到《经济学人》杂志那篇文章的，这个发人深
省的深入系列报道是关于另一个未来之邦：中国。“中国崛起”这一表述如今已成老生
常谈，我们更多地把它当成基本事实，而非一种似曾相识的预测——对20世纪50年代和
60年代的苏联，70年代和80年代的日本，以及90年代和21世纪初的欧盟所作出的错误预
测。
Why should current clichés regarding China’s supposed rise be any
different?
那么当前关于中国所谓崛起的陈词滥调，又为何要有所不同呢？
One answer suggested by The Times’s series is that Beijing has ignored
orthodox economic nostrums about the need for ever-greater market
liberalization and fewer state controls while still managing to thrive.
There’s something to that. Quantity has a quality all its own, goes the
saying, and Beijing can supply quantity like no other country save for India.
《纽约时报》的这个系列所给出的一个答案在于，北京虽然忽略了正统经济秘方，即更
大的市场自由度、更少的国家控制，但仍保持了繁荣态势。这其中有可说道之处。常言
道，量大了就会有质变，北京能够提供的数量除了印度无人可及。
It can also supply cruelty. The Laogai Research Foundation estimates the
number of forced laborers in China to be in the millions. In a superb piece
of journalism last month in Vox, Rossalyn Warren traced a desperate message
found in a Walmart purse to the Yingshan prison in southern China. The note
described 14-hour workdays and beatings.
它还有残酷。据劳改基金会(Laogai Research Foundation)估计，中国的强迫劳动者人
数达到数以百万计。在《Vox》上月一篇出色的新闻报道中，记者罗斯林·沃伦(
Rossalyn Warren)从沃尔玛购买的钱包里发现了一张绝望的字条，她追踪到了中国南方
的英山监狱。字条上说每天做工14小时还要挨打。
Tyrannies do not work in the long run. But they do know how to make people
work in the short term.
暴政从长远看是行不通的。但他们知道如何在短期内让人们工作。
Yet even with the advantages of scale and force, China isn’t working. In
2014, a year in which Beijing posted an official growth rate of 7.3 percent
(as compared to 2.6 percent in the U.S.) China lost $324 billion to capital
flight, according to a UBS estimate. In 2015, the figure more than doubled,
to $676 billion, according to the Institute of International Finance. In
2016: $725 billion.
然而，即便是坐拥规模和劳力之便，中国也还是不行。2014年，中国官方公布的增长率
为7.3％（美国则为2.6%），在这一年，瑞银(UBS)估计中国因资本外流损失3240亿美元
。根据国际金融协会(Institute of International Finance)的数据，2015年，这个数
字翻了不止一翻，达6760亿美元。2016年为7250亿美元。
Yes, some of the money goes toward productive investments abroad, not just
apartments in Sydney or bank accounts in Liechtenstein. But then there’s
the fact that some 46 percent of wealthy Chinese wish to emigrate, most of
them to the United States. If China’s prospects are as bright as China
boosters think they are, why do China’s most fortunate sons and daughters
see their future elsewhere?
没错，一些资本流向了境外的生产性投资，而不仅仅是悉尼的公寓或列支敦士登的银行
账户。但还有一个事实是，46%的中国富人想要移民，多数想去美国。如果中国的前景
真如中国的热心支持者们所认为的那般光明，那么为何中国最幸运的子女们会认为他们
的未来在别处呢？
Maybe that’s because individual rights, democratic choices, rule of law,
competitive markets, high levels of transparency, low levels of government
corruption, independent news sources, and freedoms of thought, conscience
and speech are assets beyond price —ones that Westerners tend to value too
lightly while foolishly assuming others do as well. If you define power as
the power to attract and not simply compel, then Beijing — with its
dystopian vision to fully surveil and rate all citizens by 2020 — isn’t a
rising power at all. It’s a collapsing one.
或许这是因为个人权利、民主选择、法制、竞争市场、高透明度、低腐败水平、独立的
新闻来源，以及思想、良心和言论自由度是无价之宝——西方人往往对这些习以为常，
而且愚蠢地以为其他人也是如此。如果你将实力定义为吸引力而非强迫之力，那么北京
根本就算不上一个崛起的大国——到2020年，它还将以反乌托邦的愿景对所有公民进行
全面监控和评分。它是一个正在崩坏的国家。
Maybe it’s also because the picture China presents the world about its
economic strengths is misleading. China’s economy has made its strides atop
a pile of public and private debt now $34 trillion high. Beijing claimed 6.
9 percent growth in 2017, but Chinese statistics are next to worthless —
artifacts of propaganda instead of productivity. The rise of China has also
been the rise of Chinese make-believe.
或许这也是因为中国呈现给世界关于其经济实力的图景令人产生了误解。中国经济迈出
的大步是建立在高达34万亿美元的公私债务之上的。北京声称2017年增长率为6.9%，但
中国的统计数据几乎毫无价值可言，它们是政治宣传的产物，而非生产力的结果。中国
的崛起也是中国假象的崛起。
All this may seem an excessively glum take. What about the skyscrapers of
Guangzhou? What about the world-beating test scores of students in Shanghai?
What about the hundreds of millions brought out of subsistence living and
raised to, or above, the middle class?
所有这些似乎有些过虑了。广州的那些摩天大楼怎么说？上海的学生击败全世界的考试
分数呢？数以百万计的民众脱贫且达到或超过了中产水平又怎么说？
China’s rise is not some kind of mirage. But what matters is the future,
not the past, and whether a nation built on constraining the freedoms
granted to ordinary people can outpace, outsmart, and outlast another nation
built on defending and broadening those freedoms. On current evidence, that
seems utterly doubtful.
中国的崛起并非某种蜃景。但紧要的不是过去，而是未来；紧要的是一个建立在对给予
普通人的自由进行限制的国度，和一个建立在捍卫并扩大这些权利之上的国度，前者能
否赶超、智胜且常胜。就目前的证据来看，这一点似乎绝对可疑。
American policymakers and pundits often talk about the challenge of managing
China’s rise. They had better start thinking instead of the challenge of
managing its decline, beginning at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires this
weekend. Japan and Europe went gently into eclipse, and the Soviet Union
surrendered without a fight (at least until its current revanchist phase).
美国的政策制定者和专家常谈及应对中国崛起所带来的挑战。从上周末在布宜诺斯艾利
斯的G20峰会开始，他们最好转而开始想想应对其衰退的挑战。日本和欧洲已渐渐黯然
失色，前苏联也已不战而降（至少就其目前的复仇性阶段之前而言）。
Will China’s current leadership accept the possibility of their own decline
so philosophically, after having convinced themselves of their rapid rise
to primacy? Nobody should bet on it. A wounded tiger is rarely a placid one.
在确信他们已迅速崛起到首要地位之后，中国当前的领导人能否冷静地接受自身衰退的
可能性？任何人都不应当为此下注。受伤的老虎很难保持温和。
Bret L. Stephens自2017年4月起担任《纽约时报》观点与评论版面的专栏作家。2013
年，他在《华尔街日报》工作时获得普利策评论奖。他曾担任《耶路撒冷邮报》主编。
欢迎在Twitter和Facebook上关注他。
翻译：纽约时报中文网 | M******a
发帖数: 6723 | 2 “受伤的老虎很难保持温和”
当发现谎言已经无法欺骗中国人民（早已无法欺骗世界人民）的时候，包子会不会发动
军事冒险行动？ |
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