By Huang Qing (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-07-20 10:59

The author Huang Qing is a council member of the China Foundation of International Studies

Over the last decade or so, China's economy has made impressive advances and its foreign trade has grown by dramatic margins. As a result, the country is now a dynamo of the world economy and an active member of the world economic system.

The country's economic achievements are considered something of a wonder by the international community, including Western countries. At the same time, however, some people have begun to harbor misgivings and worries about China, which, if carried to extremes, find expression in various "China threat" theories.

In the 1990s, the question of "who feeds China" was representative of such "China misgivings".

Lester Brown, founder of the US-based Worldwatch Institute, first raised the question of "who will feed China?" Brown, a researcher noted for meticulous scholarship, was worried that the country's huge population and economic situation would eventually lead to worldwide food shortages.

However, these worries have not borne out by the facts. Still, Brown's ideas about sustainable development and environmental protection have been accepted by China's leadership and, therefore, have helped shape the national policies of the country.

More recently, "worries and anxieties about China" are chiefly reflected in the claims that China causes dislocations in the global economy: that China is responsible for global warming and strains world energy supplies. The "military threat" posed by China has also been trumpeted in recent years.

In the opinion of this writer, such worries stem primarily from the changes taking place in the world and Chinese economies.

The global industrial structure has undergone a major realignment as a result of globalization, with many low-end manufacturing operations being transferred to the developing world.

China, as a result, has become a center of low-end production, or a kind of "workshop of the world".

There is no doubt that the country has benefited a lot from this process. Its foreign trade, for example, has increased in sharp upward swings, and it thus enjoys fairly large favorable trade balances.

It should, however, be noted that China, as a low-end manufacturing hub, reaps only a very small portion of the profits generated by the global industrial production chain.

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