Indeed, Chinese wind turbine producers have now gone global in their sales efforts. A report in The New York Times, published in Nov 15, 2010, said Sinovel, a Beijing-based State-owned turbine producer, signed a contract with the Massachusetts Water Authority last year to build a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine.

The turbine will provide electricity for a wastewater pumping station in the Boston suburb of Charleston. The report also said that China's fifth largest wind turbine producer, Ming Yang Power Group, has set up a sales office in Dallas, Texas.

The Chinese government has long supported renewable energy through its "863 Program". Now, the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) calls for doing the same for higher-end capital equipment.

This trend will naturally raise new fears about Chinese economic competition in the US and Europe. But while some businesses in the West will undoubtedly be squeezed, the GaveKal report says that others will benefit from having access to lower cost capital equipment to boost their productivity. As Freeman was quoted as having said in a July 23 article in Toronto-based The Globe and Mail: "The story of Chinese export deflation is far from over."

Moreover, within China, the move to higher-end manufacturing will boost Chinese wages, thereby expanding the global consumption pie both for Chinese and Western companies.

In any case, China has no choice but to transform itself into a manufacturing power, because its low-wage cost advantage is being rapidly eroded. According to the Asia-focused investment and advisory company Intercedent, rising wages and the expected revaluation of the yuan means that mid-tier manufacturing wages in China will be equal to minimum wage levels in the US by 2017.

Once that happens, the production of cheap clothing, footwear and apparel will be repatriated back to developed countries or shift to newly emerging economies like Vietnam and Bangladesh, enabling the latter to develop more rapidly.

Thus the latest stage in China's rapid economic rise is surely a win-win for the aggregate world economy. And with the US becoming less and less governable by the day and Europe trapped in a common currency that it can neither retreat from nor manage effectively, the world economy needs a new leader and growth engine.

So expect to see more and more made-in-China products on movie screens.

The author is an American corporate trainer in China.

(China Daily 08/05/2011 page9)