《财富》主编评论中国之行 2

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Thanks, Poppy.

Was anything, Andy, dramatically different from what you expected going in?

Well, you know, one thing when you were in the two big cities, Shanghai and Beijing, the buildings themselves are truly awesome. I mean, you know, you see the design and just how large the buildings are now. And I talked to some Chinese officials about that and they said, you know, we were building these things out and basically someone else told me, you know there is no zoning there in the same way that we have zoning in the United States, in US cities, so they can build these kinda wild and crazy structures. Architects from around the globe, you know, are flocking there because they are allowed to sort of build their dreams.

You know, Andy, also, with, with massive industry in China and massive amounts of exports, what you have is massive pollution.( Yeah) And did you notice a major difference in the air quality and are you noticing any shift to try to change that? Because that could be a major, major(Yeah) roadblock for this country going forward.

Right, very interesting. First of all, actually, when you are talking about what's struck me most about China, I think that I should go back and address that what's struck me most about China is the massive, massive build-out, the infrastructure build-out. You have never seen the amount of roads, rail, highway, buildings, infrastructure being built in any country in the history of humanity. This is the biggest build-out in the history of the world, you know, in one decade. It is staggering. The number of new cars coming on the road is mind-boggling. Remember, 1.3 billion people versus 300 million people in the United States, over four times bigger. The pollution situation, you know, in the two big cities for instance that I was in, and Dalian this other city, not great. You know, the cars are not belching smoke or anything like that. But it's hazy. It's sort of like, you know, L.A. on a bad day. So, you know, some of that's coming from cars, some of that's coming from factories, you can't see smoke coming from cars, but obviously, they don't have the same kind of requirements that we do. So that's a problem. The Chinese understand that but they come back and say" Look, you know, we are developing. We are like what you were pre-World War II. You have to let us get up to speed here. You know, do we have coal fired plants? Yes, we do. You know, are we concerned about global warming? Yes, but we are gonna balance it out, and we wanna do it in our terms. Who are you to tell us what to do?"

Andy, what can we learned from the Chinese?

We can learn, one thing we can learn from Chinese is hard work. It's not that Americans don't like hard work and you know, that was actually something I found very interesting. We talked about I was meeting with Chinese ministers and we were talking about the common ground between Americans and Chinese people and between America and China. And, you know, we talked about basketball. They love the NBA, the culture, the arts. But, you know, one real common denominator we have is business, Americans love business, the Chinese love business. We love to do business together, both very hard-working people, you know. So I think that, you know, we can learn that there is another country out there that's competing very, very hard with us, you know, not directly. They wanna engage with us. They wanna trade with us. They are not looking necessarily to be better than us. But they are looking to make themselves better and because of that, they are going to become equal partners with us on the world's stage very, very quickly.

Vocabulary:

1.       build out: 增建，扩建

2.       zoning: government (usually municipal) laws that control the use of land within a jurisdiction.

3.       mind-boggling: 令人难以置信的

4.       belch: 打嗝，喷出

5.       get up to: 赶上，达到

6.       coal fired plant: 火力发电厂

7.       balance out: To counteract one another so as to be balanced

8.       common denominator: A commonly shared theme or trait. 共同点，共同特色

9.       engage with: 与...接洽