2010-08-03 09:55

Jones: China and US should cooperate, share global wealth

Video: Exclusive interview with Handel Jones

SHANGHAI - Handel Jones has a bird's eye view of the huge and sprawling metropolis of Shanghai on both sides of the Huangpu River from his hotel room in downtown Shanghai.

As the founder, owner and CEO of US-based International Business Strategies, Inc, Jones started to take an avid interest in China nearly 30 years ago and now comes to the country almost every month. He can feel almost every vibrant pulse of China's economic growth, and especially its industrial development.

As an American, however, Jones is also worried. In contrast to China's growth, Jones says his own country is in "serious trouble".

"We are clearly not ready to take the hard actions required to reverse the downward spiral," he writes in his new book, Chinamerica: The Uneasy Partnership that Will Change the World.

The book, with a map of the US swathed in a Chinese five-star red flag on the cover, was published by McGraw Hill in July. In the book, Jones relates his worries and concerns about the future of the US while trying to understand "why the future of America is China".

"The cover is very shocking," Jones said in an exclusive interview with China Daily.

But "I want to give the United States a wake-up call", he said.

The book tells both the US and China stories. Jones traces the rise and fall of industries in the US, which he labels as a "weakening giant". Filling his narratives with charts, he also analyzes why the US automobile and steel industries have declined and what potential risks the American computer industry faces despite its successes to date, as represented by Steve Jobs' Apple Inc.

"Look at the (US) automobile industry, it is disastrous," he said.

"The steel industry in the US used to be strong but it is now very weak. Electronics is still very strong, but the problem is that the manufacturing is in China. So even though you buy electronic products in the US, you are still buying imports."

In the book, Jones gives an almost equal amount of space to the rapid industrialization of China, which he terms "the growing giant".

He interweaves the growth of each industrial and economic sector from textiles, machinery, automobiles, electronics, raw materials, infrastructure and transportation with his explanation of Chinese culture, government policies and economic philosophies.

There are things in China that Jones does not approve of. For instance, he believes that people are being used as an asset in China and a lot of decisions are made from the top down.

"What I keep seeing in China is the duality in terms of concepts. You revere nature, basically from some of the Confucian philosophies, and then you can have this incredible pollution," he said.

In the book, he also points out that China may falter and its global competitiveness may decline if "the system becomes bureaucratic, or if government officials and their families selfishly try to enrich themselves rather than create wealth for the good of society".