From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Thu Dec 23 1999 - 13:17:26 MST
In a message dated 12/23/99 1:20:41 PM Central Standard Time, max@maxmore.com
writes:
> It does make sense to look outside the USA for economies in strong
> positions, or for US companies that go a lot of business in those
> countries. For instance, Qualcomm will do well in China--an enormous
> market. Qualcomm is a stock that many find way too expensive, but I find
it
> quite reasonably priced and will continue to hold it.
Perhaps off-topic, but this comment revived a memory from my days
oh-so-long-ago as a China scholar. There is a scene - apocryphal for sure,
but nevertheless emblematic of the mind-set of a former age - that is well
known to historians of the West's relationship to China up until the
communist revolution. An English cotton mill owner is riding in a train
carriage some time in the first half of the 19th century, and says wistfully
to his travelling companion, "If each man in China will but lengthen his gown
by an inch, the mills of Manchester will spin for a thousand years!"
Opening up "the China market" has been a goal of the trade policies of
western countries for going on 250 years. Other than opium, the West has
never found anything to sell to the Middle Kingdom in great volume. Aside
from the opium trade, the balance has always been the other way, as it is
today. As much as the current Chinese government says that it wants to join
the WTO, I wonder whether the mercantilist policies that have always
characterized Chinese foreign policy will really change in the long run . . .
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