中国加入世贸以后，我们既感受到了经济受到刺激之后的些许亢奋，也不断经受着各种冲击引起的种种不适。不过，进步总是好的。

China learns the rules

Reuters

The best form of defence

Lawyers from Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, a Los Angeles-based firm, were in for a surprise when China’s Ministry of Commerce asked them to defend the Chinese clothes-hanger industry from a punitive tariff petition filed by American competitors. “I had no idea there was a US hanger industry,” recalls one of the firm’s partners, Hamilton Loeb. “I guess I had no idea where clothes hangers came from.”

There are, as some of the law firm’s most expensive lawyers were soon to discover, no fewer than six major manufacturers of clothes hangers in the United States. The demand by some of them that the American government, using powers derived from Section 421 of the 1974 US Trade Act, impose punitive tariffs on Chinese-made “steel-wire garment hangers” was one of the opening salvoes in an entirely new series of Sino-American trade skirmishes stemming from China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Since the WTO formally welcomed its most populous member in 2001, some of the most dramatic consequences have been played out not in China but in the offices of the American International Trade Commission (ITC) in Washington. There, American manufacturers of everything from clothes hangers to cast-iron pipe fittings have described in exacting detail the onslaught they now face from Chinese competitors, and petitioned the ITC—working with the Department of Commerce—for relief.

That China would become a prime target of such actions was predictable. No other nation boasts so potent a combination of third-world wage rates and first-world manufacturing infrastructure and engineering talent. Even Mexico’s maquiladoras along the Rio Grande are losing American export business to factories an ocean away in the Pearl and Yangzi river deltas.

More surprising has been the sophistication of China’s response, as epitomised by the Ministry of Commerce’s engagement of Paul Hastings on behalf of its clothes-hanger industry. Similarly, Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies retained Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw—whose partners include a former United States trade representative, Mickey Kantor—as an adviser in its intellectual-property dispute with Cisco. Furniture-manufacturing associations in Hong Kong and Guangdong province banded together to hire Hunton & Williams, another American law firm, to represent them in yet another anti-dumping case.

From experiences such as these China’s government and industries have learnt—to turn an old American football truism on its head—that the best defence is a good offence, and initiated an increasing number of their own anti-dumping cases. In 2004 China pursued cases targeting everything from newsprint to chloroprene rubber.

Even Chinese Davids are learning to use the law against foreign Goliaths. Memorably, a Chinese artist, Guan Dongsheng, won a 2003 Beijing court judgment prohibiting Dow Jones from continuing to use his calligraphy in its China logo. In 2004 a Chinese cartoonist filed a lawsuit alleging that Nike’s “Stickman”, used in a global advertising campaign, was copied from his own “Little Match Man”. Nike rejected the charge. But a surge in trademark and patent registrations in China suggests that brand owners are gaining confidence in the ability of the Chinese legal system to protect their rights.

In 2005 America will still have the advantage in the anti-dumping and intellectual-property wars. But as in so much else, the Chinese will be catching up fast.

Ruling the roost

The business books of 2005

The bestselling business book of 2005 has almost certainly been published already. And it may well be the same as in 2004—“Good to Great” by Michael Collins, a study of 11 companies and how their managers transformed them from ordinary to extraordinary. The book has been on the New York Times list of bestselling non-fiction almost continually since its publication in autumn 2001, and it has overtaken the 1982 classic, “In Search of Excellence” by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman, as the bestselling business book of all time.

Perhaps the first place to look for a challenger is to Mr Collins himself. He is working on a new book which examines companies that had an IPO (initial public offering of stock) in the 1990s but somehow survived the business cyclones at the turn of the century. “The book ”, he says, “will appeal to anyone who has an inner unease because they don’t know how their story ends.” Who dares say that does not apply to them?

There is, however, at least one serious challenger to Mr Collins’s dominance of the business-book market. This comes in the short but formidable form of Jack Welch. The chairman and CEO of General Electric had a global hit in 2001 with “Straight From the Gut”, which he looks set to repeat with the modestly titled “Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book”, due in May 2005.

Addressing fashionable themes helps sell books, and the subject of leadership has long been a business favourite. These books have tended to focus on what it takes to be a good leader; in 2005 the top sellers are going to be looking at what it takes to be a bad one—perhaps on the grounds that it is easier to learn how to avoid bad habits than to learn how to adopt good ones. “The Allure of Toxic Leaders” by Jean Lipman-Blumen, a California academic, and “Bad Leadership” by Barbara Kellerman, a lecturer at Harvard, both examine flawed leaders such as Ken Lay (of Enron), Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap of Sunbeam and Leona “Only little people pay taxes” Helmsley, and ask how their thousands of followers gave them a remit to lead for so long. In 2005 “Why Most Things Fail” by Paul Omerod, a British economist, will be of interest (retrospectively, anyway) to the 83% of all CEOs whose careers, and companies, go belly-up.

One type of leadership book focuses on heroes from times past and tries to draw business lessons from his (rarely her) inspiration. Recent favourites have been Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer, and Alexander the Great. Nicholas Rankin takes a fresh approach to another perennial source of inspiration, Winston Churchill, in his study of the men who influenced the former prime minister’s wartime strategies in “Churchill’s Wizards”.

2005 is also the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar and will surely see a business book or two on the effective habits of Horatio Nelson, the battle’s one-armed victor. There may be rivals in French about Napoleon, whose greatest victory (at Austerlitz) took place later that year. But publishers beware. Since Nelson died on board ship during battle, and Napoleon’s final fate was scarcely more pleasant, today’s leaders may not care to be reminded of how few of their endings are destined to be happy ones.

Business books sell best at airports and business-school bookshops. But a new market is arising in China, where the embrace of capitalism has brought a hunger for learning about its micro-practices. The World in 2005 would like to suggest (for a small share of the royalties, of course) that publishers combine China’s interest with another recurring feature of popular business books—the use of extended animal metaphors. For the Chinese, 2005 is the year of the rooster. So a business book entitled “Little Red Rooster” would surely be a hit. Chinese astrologers could be quoted: “The rooster enjoys being a part of the team,” says one of them. Roosters work “diligently for change”. But unfortunately they also “overcommit themselves” and are “unable to finish what they’ve started”. Or, as the inimitable Mississippi bluesman Willie Dixon once put it (and Sir Michael Jagger later crooned), little red roosters are “too lazy to crow for day”.

Tim Hindle: management editor, The Economist

Q2--The rooster enjoys being a part of the team---翻译这句话。