Chinese Firms Outsourcing to U.S.;”Don’t Want to Miss This Opportunity to Bottom-Fish”
May 8th, 2008Via: Los Angeles Times:
Liu Keli couldn’t tell you much about South Carolina, not even where it is in the United States. It’s as obscure to him as his home region, Shanxi province, is to most Americans.
But Liu is investing $10 million in the Palmetto State, building a printing-plate factory that will open this fall and hire 120 workers. His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China.
Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg — less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn’t have to put up with frequent blackouts.
About the only major thing that’s more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.
“I was surprised,” said the 63-year-old president of Shanxi Yuncheng Plate-Making Group. “The gap’s not as large as I thought.”
Liu is part of a growing wave of Chinese entrepreneurs expanding into the U.S. From Spartanburg to Los Angeles they are building factories, buying companies and investing in business and real estate.
Uh, how come nobody -least of all the reporter for this story- can appreciate the absurdity of the USA (the world’s MODEL capitalist economy, we are constantly told) begging Communist China for help getting our economy moving??!! And gee, you think as the dollar continues to collapse, and Chinese capital swoops in to buy up much of whats left of our domestic economy, that might give China more leverage over the U.S.? What these wonderful upbeat stories of America’s increasingly close relationship with China never point out is that the more integrated the U.S. becomes with China, the more we must become like them. And that should scare the hell out of Americans.
And here is a great book for explaining these dangers:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312362323/ref=nosim/cryptogoncom-20
Exactly! You know it would really make me feel as if Americans really were a lot smarter than Canadians and others think we are (which is a nation of idiots) if more Americans knew the REALITY that the US isn’t even a tenth as powerful as most Americans think we are, and a thousandth as powerful as the US power elites think we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have this huge military… yeah, that has all these huge weapons that can’t protect our troops and won’t protect our troops, you know, the old “sound and fury signifying nothing” shpiel. I’ve used that quote so many times on my site (http://www.somethinghappeninghere.net) that I’d be in huge trouble if Shakespeare’s descendents had that phrase copyrighted!
I tried to get my daughter to learn Chinese…she’s learning Japanese instead.
What a hoot. THE COST OF LABOR. What an effing drag. The wheel comes around. Always that freaking cost of LABOR.
The wheel comes around folks. U.S. corporatists always looking for slave wage labor costs have sent their labor costs round the world in search of the lowest common denominator.
And now CHINA wants to invest in the U.S. and is balking at labor costs?
Does anyone else but me see the strange, wry “humor” in all of this?
Actually, I don’t think its funny at all. Not a bit. I think the time has come where peoples around the world have to just say freakin NO to the slave trade in wages. Whether in China, U.S. or wherever.
I know most Americans don’t remember what it means to be a slave to the company store. But when China is shopping in the U.S. for labor? I know the U.S. is a country where individuals are living way beyond their means and NEED A WAKE UP CALL TO GET THEIR FINANCIAL HOUSES IN ORDER. But I don’t know.
What it means when the Chinese are shopping for cheap labor in the U.S.?
WE in the U.S. are farked.
Not that “we” don’t deserve it.
The “we” here are corporations.
As long as dividends and capital gains are not taxed as per George ‘Bush, there is no incentive to discontinue the rapacious behaviour of corporatists.
Not taxing capital gains has led to the feeding frenzy of corporations to move offshore.
And now foreign corporations want to move here?
There is a stench I smell arising from the plans of the Bush Mob, Rockefeller, Vatican, and Illuminati chain gangs going awry. Those slant eyed foreigners were never supposed to get the better of the Elite plan to dominate and rule by wrote.
These tinsel decorated ho-bags mentioned above misunderestimated what greed and avarice can do.
Maybe in cooperation with the Chinese and other legions of foreigners who know when to come in for the kill, American workers might not get the axe but a 80 work week instead.