渣打银行报告感叹中国变化快
我们都听说过“狗年”理论,即“人一岁狗七岁”。那么好,现在欢迎“中国年”理论。这是渣打银行的高级经济学家斯蒂芬•格林新报告的主题。他的基本假设是:每个人都生活在变化中,但其他人的变化速度远远赶不上此刻中国人的变化速度。
The US president was reacting to the hyperactive growth on what had been a collection of empty fields when his father, George H.W. Bush, was US ambassador to China. In those 2 1/2 decades, several mini-Manhattans' worth of gleaming skyscrapers had gone up.
The Chinese media breathlessly reported how impressed Bush was by Shanghai's feats. Bush said how "very impressed'' he was with a city he described as "an amazing sight at night".
Were Bush to visit China's financial district today, he probably wouldn't recognize it all over again. We have all heard of "dog years,'' or the theory that for every year a human ages, dogs age by seven. Well, welcome to the age of "China years.''
That's the subject of a new report by Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank Plc in Shanghai. His basic premise: Everyone lives through change, but not change at the speed Chinese are at the moment.
"Imagine,'' Green writes, "the unbelievable salaries your twenty-something kids suddenly have and the dizzying pace at which they shift jobs, the skyscrapers sitting on the bull-dozed tenements in which you grew up, the extraordinary travel that some of your neighbors now do, and the pain that others face as they get ill and find the local hospital wants unimaginable amounts of cash on deposit before it even looks at them. Imagine, suddenly, all those strange foreign folks on the streets, themselves also looking slightly bewildered.''
China, 2007
Yes, welcome to the China of 2007, a place that seems to reinvent itself -- at least superficially -- annually.