China: The Country and Its Globalization Perspectives

(perceptions of China and the Chinese in their actual interrelationships with themselves and the rest of the world; as well as, the potential hazards and perils of their global dominance)

As China Grows, the World Shrinks

China is everywhere these days. Powered by the world's most rapidly changing large economy, it is influencing our lives as consumers, employers, and citizens. The words "Made in China" are as universal as money: the nation sews more clothes and stitches more shoes and assembles more toys for the world's children than any other.

Moving up the technological ladder, China has also become the world's largest maker of consumer electronics, pumping out more TVs, DVD players, and cell phones than any other country. More recently, China is ascending even higher still, moving quickly and expertly into biotech and computer manufacturing.

No country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once. No country plays the world economic game better than China. No other country shocks the global economic hierarchy like China.

What we don't know about China can have global repercussions and present personal hazards!

• Three hundred million rural Chinese will move to cities in the next fifteen years; so, China must build urban infrastructure equivalent to Houston, Texas, every month in order to absorb them.
• General Motors expects the Chinese automobile market to be bigger than the the U.S. Market by 2025. Some 74 million Chinese families can now afford to buy cars.
• China has more speakers of English as a second language than America has native-English speakers.
• China has more than 300 biotech firms that operate unhindered by animal rights lobbies, religious groups, or ethical standards boards.
• On average, American companies make a 42 percent return on their China operations.
• There are 220 million "surplus workers" in China's central and western regions. The number of people working in the United States is about 140 million.
• Currently, one in ten American jobs is at risk of being "offshored".
• China has 320 million people under the age of fourteen, more than the entire population of the United States.
• More people use the internet in China than in the United States.

Globalization, for some an attempt to erode national cultures

From a cultural format, globalization has been a label used to identify attempts to erode the national cultures of Europe, and incorporate them into a global culture whose members will be much easier to manipulate through mass media and controlled governments. In this context, massive legal or illegal immigration has been allowed, mainly in European countries.

Economic globalization includes a reference to four different flows across boundaries:

• Flows of goods and services (free trade or at least freer trade).
• Flows of people (migration), of capital, and of technology.
• Increasing relations among members of an industry in different parts of the world (globalization of an industry), with a corresponding erosion of National Sovereignty in the economic sphere.
• The IMF defines globalization as “the growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services, freer international capital flows, and more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology” (IMF, "World Economic Outlook", May, 1997).
• The World Bank defines globalization as the "Freedom and ability of individuals and firms to initiate voluntary economic transactions with residents of other countries".

In the field of Management, globalization is a Marketing or strategy term that refers to the emergence of international markets for consumer goods characterized by similar customer needs and tastes enabling, for example, selling the same cars or soaps or foods with similar ad campaigns to people in different cultures. This usage is contrasted with internationalization which describes the activities of multinational companies dealing across borders in either financial instruments, commodities, or products that are extensively tailored to local markets.

Globalization also means cross-border management activities or development processes to adapt to the emergence of a globalized market or to seek and realize benefit from economies of scale or scope or from cross-border learning among different country-based organizations.

For anti-captalist groups; such as, socialists and communists, globalization is a catch-all term for the alleged negative effects of for-profit multinational corporations and the use of legal and financial means to circumvent local laws and standards, in order to leverage the labor and services of unequally-developed regions against each other.

Another kind of globalization is the spread of capitalism from developed to developing nations.