译者 日行千里
Innovation in China From brawn to brain If China is to excel at innovation, the state must give entrepreneurs more freedom
创新在中国：从体力到脑力的转型 中国要想在创新方面有不凡的表现，国家就必须给企业家更多的自由
Mar 10th 2012 | from the print edition
2012年3月10日 来源：《经济学人》纸质版
THE end of cheap China is at hand. Blue-collar labour costs in Guangdong and other coastal hubs have been rising at double-digit rates for a decade. Workers in the hinterland, too, are demanding—and receiving—huge pay increases. China is no longer a place where manufacturers can go to find ultra-cheap hands (see article). Other countries, such as Vietnam, are much cheaper. What will this mean for China and the world?
“廉价的中国”即将不复存在。在广东以及其他沿海经济中心，劳动力的价格近十年来一直在以两位数的速度增长。内地的工人也在要求大幅增加工资，而他们的工资确实也在大幅提高。中国不再是一个制造商们寻找极廉价劳动力的地方了。现在越南等其他国家的劳动力价格要比中国便宜很多。这对中国和世界意味着什么呢？
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it will not mean that companies close their Chinese factories and stampede to somewhere poorer. China is still a terrific place to make things. Labour may be cheaper elsewhere, but it is only one cost among several. Unlike its lower-paying rivals, China has reasonable infrastructure, sophisticated supply chains and the advantage of scale. When demand surges for a particular product, the biggest firms in China can add thousands of extra workers to a production line in a matter of hours.
和传统的观点相反，这并不意味着众多的公司会纷纷将设在中国的工厂转移到更穷的地方。中国仍然是一个生产制造的理想之地。也许其他国家的劳动力价格更便宜，但劳动力并不是成本的全部。和那些低工资的竞争者不同，中国有良好的基础设施、成熟的销售渠道以及规模优势。当对一个产品的需求激增时，中国的大公司可以在几小时内召集数千额外的工人走上生产线。
So China is not about to hollow out. But if it is to keep growing fast, it must become more innovative. At present Chinese innovation is a mixed bag. There are some outstanding private firms. Frugal engineers at private companies such as Mindray, which makes medical devices, and Huawei, a telecoms giant, are devising technologies that are cheaper and sometimes better than their rich-world equivalents. Manufacturers operating near China’s coast, whether home-grown or foreign, are adept at “process innovation”—incrementally improving the way they make things. And China’s internet start-ups, such as Tencent (a social-networking service) and Alibaba (an e-commerce company), have had a genius for copying Western business models and adapting them to the Chinese market.
所以说中国不会被搬空。但要保持快速增长，中国就必须更具创新性。目前在这方面中国的情况是喜忧参半。一些私有企业司做得比较出色。在诸如生产医用器械的迈瑞公司以及电信巨头华为公司等私人企业，勤俭的工程师设计出的技术产品相比富国的同类产品更为便宜，甚至更为优秀。而中国沿海的生产企业——不管是本土的还是外来的——都精于“技术革新”，从而不断地改良生产过程。而中国的新兴互联网公司，如腾讯（一家社交网络公司）和阿里巴巴（一家电子商务公司）在复制西方模式并使其适应中国市场方面表现出不凡的才能。
But innovation is about more than this. One way of defining it would be as fresh thinking that creates value people will pay for. By that measure, China is no world-beater. Though its sweat produces many of the world’s goods, it is designers in Scandinavia and marketers in California who create and capture most of the value from those products.
但创新不仅仅是这些。创新的一种定义是：用新鲜的思想创造出人们愿意为之付钱的价值。以此标准衡量，中国绝对称不上天下无敌。虽然世界上很多产品都凝聚着中国工人的汗水，但大部分利润却被瑞典的设计者或者美国加州的营销者们拿走了。
China’s leaders know this, and are pouring billions of dollars into research and development. The current five-year plan calls for “indigenous innovation”, which the government thinks it can foster by subsidising “strategic” industries and strong-arming foreign firms to transfer intellectual property to budding national champions. That system of state capitalism worked when the aim was to copy and adapt other people’s ideas in the cheapest way possible. But can new ideas truly be created by fiat? Elsewhere governments have tended to run into two problems: the state is not a good innovator, and it gets in the way of others who are. Is China really so different?
中国的领导者明白这一切，所以投入巨资鼓励科研和开发，并把“本土创新”作为当前“五年计划”的一个口号。不过，政府认为通过扶持战略产业和胁迫外企向打造中的国家龙头企业进行技术转让，就能够促成这一目标的实现。在用最便宜的方式复制和改造他人的想法方面，这种国家资本主义体制确实起了作用，但新的想法真能通过行政手段被创造出来吗？其他国家的政府常常会遇到这样的问题：自己不擅长创新，而且阻碍他人创新。难道中国真会与众不同吗？
Although the Chinese government invests a fortune in research and development, too much of this cash is wasted, according to the OECD. Most of it goes into development; not enough into research. It is far too difficult for new Chinese ideas to move from the laboratory to the marketplace. And the pockets of research excellence that exist—for example, in genomics—tend to be disconnected and politicised fiefs. Meanwhile, the state’s efforts to pick technology winners have been patchy. Telecoms has been a success, but electric cars have not, and subsidising clean-energy manufacturers has had mixed results. As for trying to set up regional internet clusters, China seems committed, but so far Silicon Valley has proved far too complex and delicate a system for a bureaucrat to copy.
虽然中国政府对科研及开发投入巨资，但据经济合作与发展组织（OECD）称，其中的浪费太严重了。大部分资金都被用于开发，而科研则得不到充足的资金。看来在中国，科研成果从实验室走向市场真是太困难了。虽然在诸如基因组学等领域中国拥有诸多卓越人才，但他们往往分散在如同政治自留地的研究机构里。与此同时，国家挑选技术胜出者的努力也不尽如人意。电信领域比较成功，但电动汽车领域则没有成功，而对清洁能源生产商的资助也没有带来满意的结果。在建立区域性互联网集群方面，中国虽然非常认真，但对于官僚主义者来说，硅谷模式太复杂太精妙，复制非常困难。
Let me in to the dragon’s den
深入龙穴，一探根源
If the argument that the Chinese state is uniquely innovative is at best unproven, the obstacles in front of a small private-sector innovator are clear. The most obvious is piracy. China’s intellectual-property laws are not bad on paper, but are enforced patchily and partially. Another problem is the way so many industries have been consolidated in the hands of favoured firms. Antitrust and competition laws are not applied vigorously to well-connected champions. State-directed banks take the Chinese people’s savings and lend them at microscopic interest rates to national champions. This starves clever but unconnected firms of capital, and cheats savers, too.
中国政府是不是特别擅长引领企业创新，往好里说，现在还不得而知。但私有的小型创新型企业所面临的障碍却是显而易见的。最明显的是盗版问题。中国的知识产权保护法制定得很好，但执行得却不够有力和公正。另一个问题是，很多产业都把持在一些特权企业手中，而对于国家龙头企业，反垄断和反不正当竞争的法律得不到有力执行。政府指导下的银行把公众的存款以极低的利率贷给这些企业，这使那些虽然善于创新但没有关系的企业得不到足够的资金，而且这也是对存款者的欺骗。
Nobody expects the Chinese government to let the reins go completely, but it needs a less top-down approach that gives its citizens more space to experiment. It must let private investors risk money on ideas they think might work, and bear the consequences of failure. An obvious place to start would be to let firms build on what they already do well, such as process innovation. But the next Chinese breakthrough may actually come in an unexpected field. China was once a dazzling innovator: think of printing, paper, gunpowder and the compass. If its rulers loosen their grip a little, it could be so again.
没人指望中国政府能彻底松开手中的缰绳，但它应该采取一种不那么从上往下的管理方式，以便给公民更大的空间进行尝试。政府必须让私人投资者为他们认为可行想法投资，并让他们承担失败的责任。作为开始，最显而易见的举措就是让企业能够进一步发挥他们擅长的事情，比如技术革新。但中国的下一次突破则很可能会出现在人们没有想到的领域。中国曾是一个了不起的创新者，古代的四大发明就是证明。如果执政者能稍微放松一下缰绳，那中国就有可能再造辉煌。
from the print edition | Leaders
from 译言-每日精品译文推荐 http://article.yeeyan.org/view/201890/257609
