我国的对外贸易站在过去150的视角外文翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 原文 China’s foreign trade: perspectives from 150 years Material Source: Author: Wolfgang·keller Ben·li In the year 2007, China’s imports accounted for 31% of its GDP, larger than for similarly developed India (25%) and about twice the size of imports for either Japan (16%)or the United States (17%). Recently, China has also become the world’s largest exporter. Today, business delegations from all over the world come to China, often accompanied by their political leaders, to ensure they are not left out in the China trade. The lure of China’s big market is nothing new. The British Plenipotentiary Sir Henry Pottinger announced after Britain’s victory over China in the First Opium War (1840‐42) that China’s potential for trade was so vast “that all the mills of Lancashire could not make stocking stuff sufficient for one of its provinces” (Chinese Maritime Customs [CMC] 1933, 39). In hindsight, Pottinger was overly optimistic: it took some 150 years more until China would deliver on its promise for world trade. The trade history of China is important for how it has affected global production and earnings in poor and rich countries alike. Many contemporary analysts view China’s recent preeminence primarily as the result of the post‐1978 reforms, perhaps contradicting the idea that sustained economic growth requires simultaneous political reform.4 Present day discussions on Chinese development have moved to a focus on China’s currency interventions that keep the Renminbi from appreciating or on China’s entry into the WTO in the year 2001.5 We contend that understanding the fundamental forces behind China’s increasingly dominant position in world trade require going further back than 1978. Reaching to the 19th century and earlier, we are in a better position to identify what is (and was) China’s ‘normal’ level of foreign trade, and how these levels changed under d