The white peril 英译汉翻译练习.doc

The white peril Mar 30th 2006 | BEIJING From The Economist print edition China is starting to worry about the size and impact of the foreign investment it has so assiduously courted ?HEAVEN help China,” said a frontheadline last December in China Industry News, a normally staid state-owned daily paper. For four months, the newspaper had been running a series of reports into takeovers of Chinese machine manufacturers by foreign companies. If such buy-outs of key firms were allowed to continue unfettered, the newspaper quoted “experts” as saying, China would lose the high-value-added core of industry built up by the “hard struggle of successive generations” since the communist takeover in 1949. Seldom has China heard such openly expressed misgivings as it has in recent months over the impact of foreign investment and economic reform. Earlier this month, during the annual session of the National Peoples Congress, Chinas parliament, the then head of the governments statistics service said that if “malicious” mergers and acquisitions by foreign companies in China continued unchecked, Chinas brands and its innovative ability would disappear. The All China Federation of Industry and Commerce, a Communist Party-backed lobby group, appealed to the congress for measures to protect “national economic security” by restricting takeovers in China by foreigners. Such concerns are common enough in any country, but in China the party has generally stifled grievances about economic policy. In the build-up to the countrys accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001, the state-controlled media dutifully stuck to the line that the benefits of joining would outweigh the disadvantages. The media said little as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs in a huge wave of closures and privatisations of state-owned enterprises beginning in the late 1990s. Only in 2004 did debate about this begin to surface after a Hong Kong academic, Larry Lang, made a speech in China attacking t