TPT November 2015

Global Marketplace

Golden Dragon was “caught unawares.” (“Chinese Build US Factories, Bringing Tensions Along with Jobs,” 30 August) Chen Mingxu – who studied in Britain and led the company’s factory in Mexico before coming to Wilcox as manager, in May – protested that $11 was only a starting salary, for workers with no experience. Even so, and despite pressure from state and company officials, the Golden Dragon workers voted to unionise. The company, adapting quickly, raised wages, addressed safety concerns, and eased its rules on sick leave and the clocking-in procedure, among other issues raised by the workforce. › Derek Scissors of the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute has said that Chinese investment in the US could increase to $100 billion over the next five years. And one of the goals of President Xi’s visit is to make progress on a treaty aimed at promoting Chinese ventures in the US. For its part, China under the treaty envisioned by Mr Xi would liberalise areas in which foreign investment is now barred or restricted. Among the prospective changes: US banks would be permitted to own Chinese subsidiaries outright, retailers could run their own distribution networks, and manufacturers could operate without a local partner. › As these large sums and lofty aims are discussed, the example of a copper tubing factory in Alabama suggests that some cross-cultural challenges lie ahead. Mr Chen, the plant manager, is philosophical about the workplace friction. “As our former leader Deng Xiaoping put it,” he told BloombergBusiness, somewhat obscurely, “we’ll cross the river by touching the stones.” A Golden Dragon engineer was more direct. “Individualism is strong among US workers,” said Qiao Gaopan. “They don’t listen to you but have lots of opinions.” Technology Condenser tubes coated with

Trade unionism With a droll name but workaday problems, a Chinese-owned copper tube factory in Alabama confronts a learning curve “As the US prepares for a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the end of September, the countries’ economic relations are undergoing a profound shift. With China facing rising wages, a falling labour supply, and excess capacity, its companies are crossing the seas to sink roots in neglected corners of the US heartland.” Writing a month before Mr Xi’s arrival in the US, the BloombergBusiness reporters Bonnie Cao and Ye Xie turned their attention to that shift. They found an example of it in Wilcox, one of the poorest counties in Alabama, where last year Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group Inc built its first US factory. A $120 million investment by its Chinese owners was augmented by $20 million from the state of Alabama, which outbid dozens of other states and cities for the business and the opportunity it represented: 200 new local jobs. In 2014, Chinese companies committed $12 billion to projects in the US – up from zero in the year 2000 and the fastest- growing source of foreign direct investment in the country. According to New York-based Rhodium Group, which tracks cross-border investment, Chinese-affiliated companies now employ more than 80,000 Americans. “Like the Japanese and Koreans before them, Chinese companies want to invest in their export market,” Bloomberg was told by David Loevinger, a former China specialist at the US Treasury who is now an analyst at fund manager TCW Group, in Los Angeles. “As exporters move up the value chain, you increasingly want to get closer to your customers.” That was a consideration for Golden Dragon, whose choice of Alabama was dictated largely by its proximity to the company’s clients in the American South. But it appears that another factor was taken too much for granted: the state’s reputation as one in which trade unions exercise comparatively little influence. A daptation and individualism Right-to-work legislation in effect in Alabama guarantees that no person can be compelled, as a condition of employment, to join a labour union – which helps explain why barely ten per cent of the state’s workers belong to unions. So is neighbouring Mississippi one of the 23 right-to-work states. But, according to Daniel Flippo of the United Steelworkers (USW), when Golden Dragon set up shop in Wilcox, it offered workers $11 an hour, compared with $18 paid by a similar factory in Mississippi. The Bloomberg reporters noted that, although tens of millions of China’s workers belong to trade unions, those groups have no say as to pay or conditions. In Alabama, they wrote,

durable and water-averse graphene hold promise for improved power plant performance

An illustration accompanying the R&D Magazine article “Making Power Plants More Efficient” (1 June) shows an uncoated copper condenser tube alongside a similar tube coated with graphene. When exposed to water vapour at 100°C the uncoated tube produced an inefficient water film while the coated tube shows the more desirable dropwise condensation. These results, reported in Nano Letters, a monthly peer- reviewed scientific journal published by the American Chemical Society (ACS), apparently establish that a layer of graphene just one atom thick can improve the rate of heat transfer by a factor of four – and potentially even more than

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N ovember 2015