Can China's Backwaters Save the Global Economy?

Can China's Backwaters Save the Global Economy?

Can China's Backwaters Save the Global Economy?
By MICHAEL SCHUMAN / XI'AN Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
I'll take this one
A woman inspects vans at Xi'an's Wuling dealership, where sales are brisk
Photograph for TIME by Tomas van Houtryve / Panos
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Though he doesn't know it, shop manager Zhu Baohua is on the front lines of the battle to reform the global economy. Zhu's three-floor electronics store, crammed with Sony TVs, Motorola cell phones and HP PCs, is located in a nondescript neighborhood in the western Chinese city of Xi'an. Far from China's dynamic coastal manufacturing and financial centers, Xi'an for decades has been an economic backwater known mainly as the home of China's famed terra-cotta warriors, reminders of the city's glory days as a capital of ancient dynasties.

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But today, Xi'an is experiencing a renaissance. The locals who frequent Zhu's store have cash — and they're spending it like never before. On a recent Wednesday in late October, hospital worker Hao Jie, 40, is gleeful after dropping $1,200 on a 52-inch LCD TV for her new apartment, the keys to which she received only days earlier. Nearby, a soon-to-be-married young couple, Zhang Guopeng and Luo Xi, sizes up washing machines using a measuring tape. The two engineers are also shopping to fill up a new apartment, their first home together. For Zhu, the busy Wednesday evening is business as usual. His store's sales have surged about 40% this year. "In the past, people only bought the electronics that they needed," Zhu says. "Now people are spending money just to enjoy it."
(See pictures of China at 60.)

This kind of exuberant consumer behavior helps to explain why China has powered through the global recession with only limited damage. Local officials expect Xi'an's gross domestic product to surge 13.5% in 2009, far faster than the central government's 8% target for the national economy. Even more importantly, the thriving economy in this city of 8 million lends hope that China might be able to complete its next great economic transformation. China has come to depend too much upon exports and investment for growth. What's needed is economic rebalancing, so that domestic consumption contributes more to expansion. This transition would help not only China — it would also help to stabilize the global economy by easing China's massive trade and current-account surpluses. With American consumer spending on the wane, China needs to rely less on U.S. markets to absorb its manufactured goods. The country's growing armies of middle-class consumers are being called upon to fill the vacuum to ensure the country can remain on its blistering growth trajectory.

Surprisingly, it is provincial cities like Xi'an that are leading this transition. In China's heartland, you won't find many factories churning out cheap toys or clothing for overseas markets, the kind of industrial activity that underpinned China's economic miracle and made Shanghai and Shenzhen wealthy. Total international trade represents a mere 18% of Xi'an's GDP, compared with 160% in Shanghai. Xi'an is being built instead on the burgeoning spending power of its own consumers, and on the expansion of Chinese companies churning out products for Chinese. "The domestic market will be the leading reason for China's future development," says Chen Baogen, Xi'an's mayor. "Xi'an is different from the coastal cities."
(See pictures of the making of modern China.)

For much of China's recent history, this difference was a liability. The country's vast, mostly agrarian West was isolated from the international economy and lagged badly behind the booming east coast in progress and prosperity. Nine years ago, Beijing sought to begin closing this development gap by investing heavily in highways, airports and other infrastructure across the western region. This has helped to kick-start growth. So has geography: Xi'an's lack of exposure to crashing global markets means it has barely been singed by the crisis. In fact, the city has benefited. It's received $230 million of Beijing's $585 billion stimulus package, which helped accelerate the construction of a new subway system, highways and other projects. A similar scenario has been playing out in other western China cities like Chengdu and Chongqing. BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research calculates that the GDP of China's western provinces grew 9.3% in the first half of 2009, compared with 6.5% in the east. This trend is likely to continue. "Growth is shifting to the interior," says Ting Lu, a BofA Merrill Lynch economist.

That's not only because of government largesse. As wages and land prices rise precipitously in China's coastal cities, Chinese companies based there are investing in operations in less-developed Xi'an to capitalize on its lower costs and tap a cheaper labor market. About 70% of Xi'an's domestic investment comes from the southeast coast. For example, in late 2008 Shenzhen-based cell-phone maker ZTE announced it would invest $880 million in manufacturing and research facilities in Xi'an that will ultimately employ 26,000 people. Hybrid-car maker BYD, also headquartered in Shenzhen, has turned Xi'an into one of its main manufacturing centers, with almost all of the cars sold to Chinese consumers. Earlier this year, the company launched a $585 million plant expansion to produce another 300,000 cars in Xi'an. In all, domestic investment in the city surged 31% to $8.1 billion in the first three quarters of 2009 from a year earlier.
(Read "China: The Road to Prosperity.")

Foreign investment is migrating to Xi'an for similar reasons. Unlike on the coast, where Hong Kong and Taiwan companies have set up countless export factories, the investments in Xi'an tend to be more domestically focused. In October, Applied Materials, a California-based maker of manufacturing equipment for the semiconductor industry, opened a solar-power research center in Xi'an, part of a $250 million investment in the city. The facility, unique to Applied Materials' global operations, will house solar-cell production lines to devise new ways of bringing down the costs of manufacturing panels. Though the results can be utilized in factories anywhere, the center is directed to a great degree at expanding the company's business within China. "China is where all the customers are," says Charles Gay, president of the company's solar-power division. "The business is growing faster here than anywhere else on the planet."

New investment and development has translated into prosperity for Xi'an residents. The per capita GDP of the city has increased 150% between 2001 and 2008 to $3,800 (though it remains far behind rich coastal cities like Shanghai, where GDP per capita exceeds $10,500). Consumer spending is growing quickly as well. In the first nine months of 2009, retail sales in Xi'an jumped 19% compared to those in the same period a year earlier, well above the 14.8% posted in China's cities nationally. BofA Merrill Lynch estimates that retail sales in the western provinces rose 19.2% in the first half of 2009, 3 percentage points more than in the east. "Xi'an has reached a very important development stage," explains Chen, Xi'an's mayor. "Incomes are just at the first point when people can buy homes and cars."

That fact was obvious one recent Wednesday morning at a Wuling minivan dealership in Xi'an. Customers streamed into the showroom, briefly opened and closed the doors of the displayed minivans, and then marched over to the front desk to plop down their money, often within mere minutes of arriving. Xu Zhanrong, the dealership's deputy general manager, can barely keep the Wulings in stock. Sales of the minivans — manufactured by a joint venture between General Motors, Liuzhou Wuling Motors and Shanghai Automotive Industry — are up some 40% this year, Xu says, with about 50 purchased each day. One big reason, Xu explains, is that his customers, and especially those who come in from the nearby countryside, don't worry as much about saving for their old age as they had in the past. "Now they find they have more money, to spend and enjoy life more, however they want to use it," Xu says. "From what I see, people are changing very dramatically."

To keep that change going, the Chinese government has more work to do, however. Though the ingredients of rebalancing might be percolating in Xi'an and the rest of China, making it actually happen will take additional reform. The economy is still too dependent on investment and government spending instead of private consumption. Even though consumer spending is increasing, it is not growing quickly enough. Private consumption's role in the economy has actually been declining, to a mere 35% of GDP in 2008 from 46% in 2000. Economists say policymakers need to speed up the development of a better social safety network, encourage small-scale finance and liberalize service industries dominated by big state firms to further raise incomes and encourage Chinese to spend more and save less.

There is also concern that growth will slip backward once China's recession-fighting stimulus is scaled back. One reason Xu's minivan sales have accelerated is government tax breaks and rebates offered on certain car purchases — incentives that won't last forever. State subsidies have also been given to rural residents to spur sales of refrigerators and washing machines. Though the government is implementing longer-lasting plans to convince citizens to spend more money (including a $125 billion program to improve national health care, especially in less developed regions), those efforts will take years to reach their full impact.

Yet there are signs that there may be enough solid demand within China's domestic market to keep Xi'an's growth story alive. Carsten Wiegandt, the German acting general manager of the Kempinski Hotel, located on the city's outskirts, has been surprised by the kind of visitors filling his rooms. After the five-star hotel opened in June 2008, management expected tourists arriving from overseas to see the terra-cotta warriors. When the global recession hit, he feared his business might suffer. Instead he found visitors pouring in from other parts of China, many attending conferences being held by Chinese companies at the hotel. Now, with Chinese clientele making up 80% of his business, Wiegandt has refocused his marketing efforts away from the U.S. and Europe and toward big Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing. "I didn't expect the domestic market to be so strong," he says.

But perhaps the biggest reason for optimism is Xi'an residents like Lu Bo. The 32-year-old says the salary he earns as a salesman in the air-freight department at China Eastern Airlines was reduced by a third last year when his company was hit hard by the financial crisis, but that hasn't stopped him from spending. So confident is he about the future, he recently went out shopping for a new refrigerator. "Judging from my job, my life, I think everything will become better and better," Lu says. And maybe for the entire world economy as well.

— with reporting by Chengcheng Jiang / Xi'an