HOW HE SEES IT Look for 'Made in China' label on noodles

By KEVIN HORRIGAN
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
My children discovered instant ramen noodles during the Reagan administration. At any time of the day or night, one or more of them was in the kitchen boiling water and tossing in a brick of dried fried noodles.
We were late adopters. Much of the world already had caught onto ramen noodles by then. Indeed, in one poll, the people of Japan ranked instant ramen noodles as their country's most significant invention of the 20th century. You can't eat a Walkman. You can't eat a Toyota.
My children would have agreed. They ate ramen noodles by the case. Much of the time during their Ramen Years they ate nothing else. Their mother and I disagreed about the wisdom of this. "High in fat, high in salt," she said. A dime a pack, I said. Sally Struthers spends more to feed kids than we do.
I thought about our Ramen Years last week when I read -- in Ted C. Fishman's new book, "China, Inc." (Scribner's) -- that the ramen noodle industry is yet another one about to be taken over by the Chinese. It's not enough that they've got electronics, textiles and soon will have automobiles. Now it's ramen noodles, too.
"So a noodle that originated in China (ramen is the Japanese pronunciation of "lo mein") became popular in Japan, and then, when noodle manufacturers moved from Japan to China, the noodle became popular in China because of its Japanese appearance and soon it may be even more popular in Japan because of its Chinese price," Fishman writes.
There are now 300 ramen noodle manufacturing plants in China, and the government is ramping up production as fast as it can with an eye to the export market. Chinese ramen sells in Japan for a tenth of the cost of Japanese ramen, and the day may not be far off when giant container ships full of Chinese ramen dock in Long Beach and undercut U.S. manufacturers.
Ramen is the least of our problems. Fishman says Americans -- and particularly American workers -- haven't yet fully grasped the enormity of China's intentions. Nearly everything that is manufactured in America can be -- and in many cases, already is -- manufactured in China.
Bully
"China still only makes one-twentieth of everything produced in the world, but on the world stage, it plays the role of a new factory in an old industrial town," Fishman writes. "It can spend, it can bully, it can hire and dictate wages, it can throw old-line competitors out of work. It changes the way everyone does business."
China has between 100 and 160 cities of at least one million people; they're filling up fast as hundreds of millions of willing and compliant workers (a number that exceeds the entire U.S. workforce) migrate from the countryside. They'll work for 25 cents to 40 cents an hour and still send money home. Their labor allows manufacturers to sell at what's known on the world market as the "China price," synonymous with "lowest price possible." Fishman writes, "The China price is part of the new conventional wisdom that companies can move nearly any kind of work to China and find huge savings. It holds that any job transferred there will be done cheaper, and possibly better."
China is making not just finished goods -- shirts, pants, TVs, radios -- but increasingly, it is manufacturing component parts. Automobile parts, for example, is a $750 billion a year business in the United States; China is coming after it relentlessly. China exported $6.5 billion in automotive parts in 2003, double the amount exported in 2002. It is making knobs, dashboards, wiring harnesses, seats, electronics ... almost anything that goes into a car or other durable good.
Chinese Jeep
Increasingly, as General Motors Corp. or Ford Motor Co. asks a supplier for the China price on a component, suppliers are building plants in China. GM and Ford are building plants there, too. A Chinese company called Wanfeng, having reverse-engineered a Jeep Grand Cherokee (there is no such thing as proprietary technology in China) is selling a Cherokee clone on the world export market for $10,000.
What happens to the Ford plant in Hazelwood, Mo., or the DaimlerChrysler plant in Fenton, Mo., when China starts selling knockoff Explorers and Caravans in the United States?
"China Inc." is a scary and important book. Fishman suggests that while U.S. policymakers are preoccupied with the "clash of civilizations" with Islam in the Middle East, the drain of jobs and national wealth to China is the far more serious long-term problem. We may wind up eating Chinese ramen because it's all we can afford.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.