China as the Largest Manufacturing Nation

choi

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VOA had a report on this. But Financial Times at the time had more, which, judging from similar content with other news reports, suggests all media outlets gleaned information from press release/study of IHS Global Insights. The press release is not released to the public and thus not available online ffree. IHS Global Insights is a privately held consultancy headquartered at Lexington, Massachusetts and formed in 2001 out of merger of several companies.

Peter Marsh, China Noses Back Ahead as Top Goods Producer to Halt 110-Year US Run. FT, Mar 13, 2011 (title in the print).
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/002fd8f0-4d96-11e0-85e4-00144feab49a.html
("Mark Killion, IHS’s head of world industry services, said, however, that the findings from the latest data were far from bleak for US manufacturing. 'The US has a huge productivity advantage in that it produced only slightly less than China’s manufacturing output in 2010 but with 11.5m workers compared to the 100m employed in the same sector in China'”)

My comment:
(a) The print edition had a table. (The online version has a link with the clause “closing of a 500-year cycle in economic history" which probably points to the same table.)

World Leaders
Leading manufacturers since the Dark Ages*
500-1700 China or India
1700-1850 China
1850-1895 Britain
1895-2010 US
2010 China

* Data until the 20th century are approximate.
(b) China might have been the largest manufacturing nation before 1850. But when Matteo Ricci 利瑪竇reached Macao in 1552, it was apparent that artisans in China could not make a lot of things the West was making.

Italian adjective "riccio" means "curly" (hair).


--------------------Separately
James Grant, Heavy Duty; In 1930, Willis Hawley predicted that his tariff bill would bring 'a renewed era of prosperity.' Wall Street Journal, Mar 16, 2011.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576199660599909544.html
(book review on Douglas A. Irwin, Peddling Protectionism; Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression.
Princeton Univ Press, 2011)

Quote: "the tariff was the workhorse of the U.S. Treasury before the 20th-century income tax.

My comment: In the midst of the financial crisis, Professor Michael Pittis of _Peking University concluded China as the world's workshop would suffer, due to overcapacity (as US did in the Great Depression). China did not (or has not), but Japan manufacturing did. Odd. Maybe we will have ot wait for future analysis.

※ 修改:．choi 于 Mar 21 12:00:27 修改本文．[FROM: 129.10.0.0]