这段以前我贴过，这本书也是诸多本书那样，我看到一半，傅建军用药物阻止我继续看下去
Wuhu officials bypassed the central government for approval of their pioneering plan,turning to the local People’s Congress—China’s answer to a town council—for approval.The city was greatly aided by Chen’s prestige.As Chen and the Wuhu officials saw it,they were creating a virtuous cycle.Public works like roads would boost home prices,which in turn would boost land prices.Higher land prices would mean more local government income,hence more spending.
CDB built Wuhu Construction into a giant;eventually its assets grew from 319 million to 21.4 billion yuan,and it bought equity stakes in 21 local companies, including Chery, which is now using CDB backing to expand into every corner of the developing world,from Africa to Latin America.“From then on,the Wuhu Model was extensively applied across the country,” the bank’s official history says,boosting urbanization,leaving a“precious legacy in the field of financing for urban infrastructure construction.”But what on earth had it started?CDB’slending to local governments did not crowd out other lenders of capital,as some say state-owned development banks can do.Instead,it sucked them all in.The model’ssuccess in Wuhu was replicated across the country,with CDB lending money to LGFVs in Shanghai(home to former president JiangZemin)and Tianjin (home to Premier WenJiabao)as well as the canal city of Suzhou.
One item few prospectuses omit:homage to CDB.Tianjin Binhai Construction and Investment Group,which was set up in 2005 in an agreement between the city and CDB,said it“relied on CDB from the outset.”Huainan Urban Construction Investment Co.in Anhui,which won a 7.1 billion yuan loan from CDB at the beginning of 2008,said it relied on CDB loans to finance most of its projects.In Jiamusi,an Amur River city near the Russian border in Heilongjiang,a 2010 prospectus bragged that the local investment company,Jiamusi New Era Infrastructure Construction Investment Group Co.,was“among the top 100 cities that get CDB support.” In the South,on the border with Myanmar,Yunnan Highway Development Investment Co.—more on them later—was created in 2006 through an agreement with CDB.
While Zhu Rongji’s 1994 reforms centralized tax collection,they perversely allowed local governments greater control over the usage rights of land,allowing them to keep all land-leasing revenues.This growing,valuable state-owned resource was now totally in the hands of local governments,and they had no obligation to publish their budgets to the public.
The inequality in some cases has led to violence,far away from the confines of the state-banking system.That was certainly the case in Fuzhou,a city in JiangxiProvince,just to the east of Hunan.There,a land dispute with the government was central to a May 2011 bombing that killed three people.Qian Mingqi allegedly set off three blasts at or near government buildings in the city amid a dispute over compensation he had been offered in a resettlement,according to reports by the official Xinhua News Agency.Qian died in one of the explosions. He had been asking for more compensation after being resettled in 2002 to make way for a highway. Three months before the bombings,Fuzhou’s investment vehicle went to the country’s bond market for the first time,raising 800 million yuan.In its prospectus,in which it said it received CDB loans,the company said its main business included construction,land development,and“resettlement.”
The key was that Tianjin could use 15 years of land usage rights sales to secure the loan,both to act as collateral and as a source to pay back the funds.The city also had to promise to use its own infrastructure fund to pay back the money if land sales ran into difficulties.The bankers forecast that the land sales income would increase every year by 10 percent. That turned out to be a conservative bet:In reality,the income increased by 20 percent.By 2006,land income was 10.3 billion yuan,up from 2.4 billion yuan in 2004.By 2009,it was a different story:China Index Academy estimated the city’s land sales revenue was 73.2 billion yuan,a 67 percent increase over 2008.
While the out break of severe acute respiratory syndrome(SARS) in 2003 in Beijing intervened and prevented Chen Yuan from visiting Tianjin to sign the deal,it was eventually signed in June of that year.The original loan contract was signed with the city’s land bank;in 2004, the city set up an LGFV with four subsidiaries to handle the different projects,including two subway lines,greening of the city,and riverside infrastructure development.The importance of land as collateral acted in the same way that CDB would use oil overseas in Africa and Asia.The income from the subway,the book notes,only needed to cover operating costs;it doesn’t need to pay back the loan.The money to pay back the loan for all the projects will nearly all come from government income from selling land rights.The investment that CDB started helped bring in the property developers,too:The riverside construction project saw 10 billion yuan of investment in infrastructure but drew a total of 80 or more billion yuan of property construction,according to the book. Yet there’s a point where ambition and enthusiasm becomes recklessness and hubris,and Tianjin may have crossed that line.There’s no better place to witness the physical manifestation of hubris than Yu jiapu, Tianjin’s planned Manhattan.
Xu says the buildings in Yu jiapu are all being occupied by stateowned companies,including a steel company and a mining company turned realestate developer that is putting the finishing touches on Tianjin’s answer to Rockefeller Center.Asked if any private companies were setting up shop there,she pointed to a hotel.A giant billboard in Conch City—red background with white characters—quotes Chinese president Hu Jintao,who visited the area in April 2011,as saying“Put all your strength into storming the fort to win the battle of developing and opening the Binhai NewArea,work hard to become the lead soldiers in the battle to realize scientific development.”Not words you’d find in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
To build Yu jiapu,Tianjin officials are piling onto borrowing that was already half a trillion yuan by the end of 2011—equivalent to half the annual per-capita income of the city’s 13 million people.More than 5,000 people were moved out of the area starting in 2008 to make way for the project,among the millions nationwide evicted from homes to make way for China’s urbanization projects.Tianjin Binhai New Area Construction&Investment Group Co.sold 10 billion yuan worth of bonds in December 2011,earmarking 1 billion yuan from the sale to fund the construction of the district’s transport hub,which includes a high-speed rail line that will cut travel time to Beijing to 45 minutes.In the first half of that year,its debt,mostly from bank loans and led by CDB,rose 11.9 percent from the end of 2010 to 71 billion yuan, according to a bond prospectus.To finish all the projects,more money is needed,said Tianjin’s vice mayor,Cui Jindu.
CDB’s lending to local governments stems from the failure of Zhu Rongji’s 1994 reforms ,which left local government swith huge spending burdens —everything from providing water to roads—but no way to raise funds apart from leasing out state land.The prohibition set on borrowing by local governments was a rule observed only in the breach,just pushing the borrowing off the budget and into the arms of the state banks.Without any transparency,and with all of the capital from the state-owned banks rather than private institutions,the market has added no discipline.In one case,a Shanghai LGFV (Local Government Financing Vehicles )borrowed 2 billion yuan of loans for a high-speed railway project,but ended up using half the money for property projects.After the experience of the late 1990s,when many local government and state-owned enterprise loans were bailed out,the commercial banks were supposed to look after themselves,yet many of the projects they piled into led by CDB had poor returns.
There was a fundamental mismatch:The debts and the companies themselves were left off local government balance sheets,even as investors,banks,and ratings companies viewed them as having the implicit guarantee of local governments.Today,the LGFV's (Local Government Financing Vehicles )have dozens of subsidiaries,cross-holdings,and cross-guarantees,making it impossible to tell how much one local government is on the hook for if one linkin the chain is broken.Some LGFVs(Local Government Financing Vehicles ) have also turned into lenders,passing on money to property companies.While China wanted the institutions and infrastructure of a bond market,at the same time as it expanded, banks did their best to hollow out the integrity and effectiveness of those same institutions.Ratings agencies gave bonds sold by local government backed companies high ratings because they believed in the implicit back stop of the local government;investors took the yield as free money.At least the ratings agencies themselves were self-conscious enough to recognize the self-destructive behavior.“Who ever gives them the better rating gets the business,”Dagong’s fiery chairman,Guan Jiangzhong,told us.“This is very dangerous.”
While there is no way of telling what assets CDB was left with,the experience of cities like Chongqing,where GDP growth was16.4percent in 2011,showed that for all its problems,there is sheer genius behind the model.Chen Yuan of CDB had realized in 1998,before other banks, the force of urbanization and its role in economic growth.China long ago decided that the key to GDP growth is boosting productivity,and few economic events boost the productivity of a populace than moving them from life on a farm to life in the city.And that’s exactly what happened in Dawu village to Li Liguang.
The reliance on LGFVs(Local Government Financing Vehicles ) has also created one of the world’s biggest property bubbles:Nation wide,housing prices in China have risen at least by 140 percent since 1998.And unlike the welfare,health,and pension expenses that have crippled Europe,China’s forced urbanization has left a lot of debt before it even begins to deal with these expenses.By 2011, Standard Chartered was predicting that China’s debt levels were in reality around 71 percent of its 2010 GDP,approaching US levels.No one knew how far the debt extended,who else had lent to the companies,and who was liable.There was only one way that China would pay for this debt,and that would be through China’s savers,through higher tax,or through more inflation.
没有评论:
发表评论