China aims to be top auto manufacturer by 2020

SHANGHAI -- China is expected to surpass the United States as the world's top automotive market by 2020, with output reaching 15 million units, a Chinese academic at a government think-tank said.

China's motor vehicle output will likely grow 10 percent annually in coming years, said Zheng Xinli, vice director of the Chinese Communist Party's Policy Research Office, in a report published in the Economic Daily.

Passenger cars may account for some 60 percent of the total production, he said.

Last year, China's vehicle output grew 12.56 percent versus 2004 to 5.71 million units, according to statistics from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

Zheng mentioned home-grown Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd. and Chery Automobile Co. as two of the firms poised for the market expansion.

"Their success is evidence that the Chinese industry can wholly depend on our own efforts, to make automotive products based on our own intellectual property," said Zheng.

Chery exports its low-priced cars to roughly 30 countries, most of them developing nations, and Geely founder and chairman Li Shufu told Reuters in September he hoped to sell cars in the United States by 2008. A third company , Nanjing Automobile Corp., is planning to reintroduce the MG sports car -- but built in Oklahoma from kits made in China.

China is going to dominate us soon if we are not careful and figure out a way to manufacture goods for less.

But, Dad, we did. We moved the factories to China!

LOL! Indeed they did. And Detroit has been left no alternative by W

To hell with the Middle Class apparently...as noted by Phyllis Schlafly...

Middle class will look for a friend in either party
By Phyllis Schlafly, Townhall Forum
Monday, November 27, 2006
The best post-mortem on the 2006 election came from that perennial politician, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass. He said, "People want to know who's on their side. Whether it's health care or wages or retirement issues, they want to have someone on their side."
The biggest electoral bloc of the "they" who are seeking friends is the middle class, which includes people variously labeled blue-collar workers, skilled workers or Reagan Democrats. They are the swing voters, often called the moveables.
President Ronald Reagan's victories absolutely depended on their support. But Presidents Bush I and II kicked them away from the Republican Party, particularly on the issue of jobs.
Did the 2006 election teach Republicans that it is smart to be friends of the middle class? Have Republicans realized that jobs were second only to the unpopular war as the issue of 2006, and will surely be the No. 1 issue in 2008? George W. Bush carried Ohio in 2004 because the marriage amendment brought out the values voters. But Democrats can play that game, too: In 2006, the Ohio referendum on increasing the minimum wage raised the jobs issue, passed by 57 percent, and helped to bury Republican candidates.
Ohio has lost its manufacturing base. Some of the good jobs went to plants that were outsourced overseas and some disappeared in the tsunami of cheap Chinese goods as Wal-Mart replaced small businesses and left behind towns with empty streets and boarded-up windows.
Incumbent Republican Sen. Mike DeWine was badly defeated by Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who had led the congressional fight against CAFTA and wrote a book called "The Myths of Free Trade" (New Press, $16). Brown's TV ads showing him standing in front of a "plant closed" sign were powerful.
Almost every Republican member of Congress who bit the dust in the 2006 election had been an enthusiastic booster of the globalists' agenda: North American Free Trade Agreement, Central American Free Trade Agreement, World Trade Organization, Fast Track, permanent normal trading relations and free trade agreements with countries most Americans never heard of. Republicans were badly on the defensive in the face of Democrat ads touting the issue of jobs. The United States has lost more than 3 million manufacturing jobs since George W. Bush became president in 2000. The U.S. trade deficit hit a record high of $717 billion last year, and is expected to be even higher this year.
The middle class is not placated by feel-good talk that the stock market has climbed to a record high, or that unemployment is at a record low, or that the gross domestic product is growing. Unemployment statistics don't count the guys who lost $50,000 jobs in manufacturing and are now working $25,000 jobs in retail, but job-growth figures happily do count the wives who have been involuntarily forced into the labor force just to keep groceries on the table. The middle class is not placated by glib slogans that free trade is good for the economy and that protectionism is a nasty word. Common sense tells them that there is no such thing as a free lunch and, yes indeed, they do expect friends in government and industry to protect U.S. jobs against unfair competition from foreigners who work for 30 cents an hour.

Here is the second page which got omitted from Schlafly:

Americans relish competition, as our national fixation on sports contests proves every day. But the globalists have destroyed a level playing field and, in addition, have subordinated us to an umpire (aka the World Trade Organization) that is biased against us.
Globalist policies have encouraged U.S. employers to use near-slave labor in Asia, whose products are then guaranteed duty-free or low-tariff re-entry to the United States. Those products are then sold here for prices that are cheap by U.S. standards but are marked up as much as 80 percent.
Globalist policies also allow discrimination against U.S. manufacturers by the Value Added Tax racket, whereby foreign governments subsidize their products both coming and going. For example, German automobiles cost 16 percent less in the United States than the same car sold in Germany, and U.S. automobiles cost 16 percent more in Germany than the same car bought in the United States. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., plans to shift the dialogue on Capitol Hill to worker's pay, college tuition, health care costs and other issues that touch ordinary families. Her solutions are all bad economics and very expensive, but they will enable her to pose as a friend of the middle class.
All six U.S. senators thought to be planning a run for the Democratic nomination for president voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The issue would be dramatically joined if the Democratic nominee were opposed, for example, by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who supported NAFTA, CAFTA, WTO and permanent normal trading relations for China.
Will Republicans continue to follow George W. Bush in his post-election travels to solicit even more Asian products made by cheap labor and subsidized by their governments? Or will Republicans get smart on the jobs issue and re-establish their friendship with the Reagan Democrats?
__________________________________________
Phyllis Schlafly is a national leader of the pro-family movement, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Feminist Fantasies.

One area I would issue a caution to some of the well intended industrial policy activists would be insinuations of any sort of conspiratorial aspect of globalism. I am well positioned to comment here as I have been in the thick of waves of outsourcing in high tech. In truth, this is 100% a tactical issue. Allow me to explain. Way down in the lower ranks of management, there are various people responsible for various goals such as "10% reduction in landed product cost per quarter" etc. You do what you have to do to keep the old paycheck coming. Your average commodity manager has a geopolitical IQ of about 20. So, the guy reads some hyped up thing in a purchasing mag about manufacturing in China, looks at his mandatory cost reduction goal and next thing you know, a board or even a system is going over to China. The Chinese are brilliant in this regard. They have studied us. They know how much we dwell down in the tactical muck of making 13 week goals. They flicked their flies and we trout lunged.

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