本周，我收到东京的一位朋友发来的电子邮件，结束语是：“来自三号国家——日本——的问候”。他是在悼念一个时代的终结。他所影射的第二季度经济数据显示，即使是按美元计算，中国也已然是全球第二大经济体。中国将在这个位置上呆下去，直到超越美国成为老大——除非遭遇大灾难或经济停滞。
按美元计算相当没道理，因为汇率波动对数据的影响丝毫不亚于经济活动。这样计算并未考虑到，在北京买一套房、吃一顿饭或做一次足疗要比东京便宜得多。按购买力计算，中国经济早在差不多10年前就超过了日本。但这具有重要的象征意义。从这一点上讲，中国取代日本的确开创了一个新秩序。自1968年日本超越当时的西德，成为全球第二大资本主义经济体以来，第一次出现了一个新的国家，觊觎着美国的宝座。
1968年的日本与2010年的中国存在许多重要的相似之处。当年，日本取得的成就彻底推翻了西方人固有的一切种族歧视观念：即非白种人的现代化能力有所欠缺。就在1958年，自由派经济学家约翰•肯尼思•加尔布雷斯(John Kenneth Galbraith)还在《富裕社会》(The Affluent Society)一书的开篇，将富裕民族界定为“欧洲人生活的一个世界小角落”。对于许多亚洲人来说，中国的崛起象征着亚洲地区理所应当地回到了人类活动的中心。过去20个世纪里，中国有18个世纪都位居世界经济之首，现在，拥有古老书写体系的它不过是让一切恢复到“本来的”状态而已。
与今天的中国一样，1968年同比经济增幅达到12%的日本，几乎不惜一切代价追求增长。就在这一年，日本政府承认了水俣湾悲剧：几十年来，智索株式会社(Chisso Corporation)不断将汞冲刷进水俣湾，导致当地居民出现严重畸形。直到1970年日本国会制定了《水污染控制法》，强制进行彻底清理，日本政府才开始着手解决环境破坏的遗留问题。中国领导层已开始对此类问题至少予以口头上的关注。但目前，仍有无数中国人因呼吸道疾病而早逝，而河流污染不止，食品掺假事件频发。
另一个类似之处是汇率。当时的日元就像今天的人民币，人们普遍认为被低估了。二战结束后，日元兑美元汇率一直固定在360日元兑1美元。1985年，在五国财长在《广场协议》(Plaza Accord)——更像是一出“广场哑剧”——中同意美元贬值后，日元兑美元汇率从平均240日元兑1美元升至128日元。如果人民币以类似的幅度升值，中国经济与美国的差距将在一夜之间就大幅缩小——按美元计算，目前中国经济规模约为美国的三分之一。
但中日两国之间的差异却更加有趣。1968年时，日本正在成形的世界级企业要多于今天的中国。那时，日本已走上了成为富国的道路。而今天，中国的名义人均收入只有3867美元，与萨尔瓦多相差无几。一个相对贫穷的国家拥有巨大的全球影响力，这在现代史上还是头一次。而这个国家正通过在非洲的投资和在气候变化会议上的投票来施加影响。
中国有时候发现，顶着“穷国”的帽子，行事要更加方便。不过，它现在的表现已远比日本更加自信。日本引人瞩目的崛起存在一些异乎寻常之处，其中之一便是崛起并未带给它相应的外交影响力。中国的胆略则要大得多。它正在迅速现代化的军力，它的贸易网络和投资纽带，它对国家利益的关注（无论是在南海还是在苏丹），都让它与仍躲在美国保护伞下的日本形成鲜明对比。
中日两国通过“软实力”来施加影响的能力存在差别。中国的共产主义制度对发达国家几乎毫无吸引力，但对那些希望先实现现代化、再建设民主秩序的贫穷国家来说，中国的制度可以说树立了一个样板。与之相反，曾有人真切认为，日本提供了一种优越的资本主义模式——有顺从的工会、即时制生产和得到政府资助的冠军企业。不过，随着时间的推移，中国更有可能施加全球影响力。在《当中国统治世界》(When China Rules the World)一书中，马丁•雅克(Martin Jacques)着重强调了“中央王国”的文化优越感。雅克的主张可能有些夸大其辞，但其中至少有一点说得很有道理：中国的崛起可能最终会在一定程度上，按照它自己的形象重塑世界。（有3000名英国学生参加了今年的普通话一级考试，创下历史纪录。）
两国最重要的差异也是最明显的差异。中国人口达13.4亿，占全球人口总数的五分之一，是日本的10倍。因此，中国在实现工业化、打造美国式生活水准、倾销出口商品、同时避免遭遇重大资源与政治限制方面，也会比日本难上十倍。另一方面，规模也赋予了中国潜力，让它能够塑造自己所处的这个世界——无论是通过挑战美元霸权，还是通过把本国利益强加给他国（必要时将使用武力）。排在第二位的日本显示出了亚洲的潜力。排在第二位的中国则构成了真正的挑战。
译者/何黎
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001034192
This week, I received an e-mail from a friend in Tokyo tagged: “Greetings from Number Three, Japan.” He was mourning the passing of an era. The quarterly numbers he was alluding to suggest that, even in dollar terms, China is now the world’s second biggest economy. There it will remain until, catastrophe or stagnation aside, it overtakes the US to become Number One.
Dollar comparisons are pretty arbitrary, as much influenced by currency fluctuations as by economic activity. They do not take into account that it is much cheaper to buy a house, a meal or a foot massage in Beijing than in Tokyo. In purchasing power terms, China’s economy surpassed Japan’s nearly a decade ago. But symbolism counts. And by that measure, China’s usurpation indeed ushers in a new order. For the first time since 1968, when Japan overhauled the then West Germany to become the second largest capitalist economy, there is a new pretender to the US throne.
There are important similarities between Japan in 1968 and China in 2010. Then, Japan’s achievement demolished any lingering racist notions that non-whites were somehow incapable of modernisation. As recently as 1958, liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith had begun The Affluent Society by defining wealthy nations as those “in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans”. For many Asians, China’s rise symbolises their region’s rightful return to the forefront of human endeavour. China, with an ancient writing system and the world’s biggest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries, is simply restoring affairs to their “natural” state.
Like China today, 1968 Japan – which had expanded by 12 per cent the previous year – pursued growth at almost any cost. That was the year Japan’s government owned up to the tragedy in Minamata where for decades the Chisso Corporation had been causing devastating human deformities by flushing mercury into the bay. It was not until the 1970 “Pollution Diet”, when parliament enforced a radical clean-up, that Tokyo began to address its legacy of environmental destruction. China’s leadership has begun to give such problems at least rhetorical attention. But for now, hundreds of thousands of Chinese people die prematurely of respiratory disease, while rivers continue to be poisoned and food to be adulterated.
Another similarity is currency. The yen then, like the renminbi now, was widely regarded as undervalued. It had been pegged at Y360 to the dollar since the war. In 1985, after finance ministers from five countries agreed a dollar depreciation in the Plaza Accord – more like the Plaza Mugging – it leapt from an average Y240 to Y128. If the renminbi rose by a similar amount, China’s economy – today about one-third the size of America’s in dollar terms – would dramatically close the gap overnight.
The differences between China and Japan are more intriguing still. By 1968, Japan had more world-class companies in the making than China does now. It was already on the way to becoming a rich country. Today, China has a nominal per capita income of $3,867, almost identical with that of El Salvador. For the first time in the modern era, a relatively poor country has enormous global clout, exerting influence through investments in Africa and votes at climate change conferences.
China sometimes finds it convenient to hide behind the “poor country” label. But it is already far more assertive than Japan. One of the extraordinary aspects of Japan’s spectacular rise was the lack of resulting diplomatic influence. China is far less inhibited. Its rapidly modernising military, its web of trade and investment links and its sense of national interest – whether in the South China Sea or in Sudan – set it apart from a Japan still hiding behind US skirts.
The two countries have differing abilities to exert influence through “soft power”. China’s Communist system has little obvious attraction for advanced nations, though for those poor countries wishing to prioritise modernisation over democratic niceties it arguably offers a template. By contrast, there were people who once took seriously the notion that Japan offered a superior model of capitalism with compliant unions, just-in-time production and state-sponsored corporate champions. Yet over time, China has a better chance of exerting global influence. Martin Jacques probably overstates the case in his book When China Rules the Worldin which he emphasises the Middle Kingdom’s sense of cultural superiority. But there is at least a grain of truth in his assertion that China’s rise could, eventually, remake the world partially in its own image. (A record 3,000 British students sat this year’s Mandarin A-level.)
The most important difference is the most obvious. China’s population of 1.34bn – one person for every five on the planet – is 10 times that of Japan. That makes it 10 times harder for China to feed its industrial habit, to re-create an American standard of living or to pour out exports without clanking against big resource and political constraints. On the other hand, scale confers on China the potential to mould the world it inhabits, whether by challenging the supremacy of the US dollar or by imposing its national interest on others, by force if necessary. Japan at Number Two showed Asia’s potential. China at Number Two is the real deal.
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