Both bulls and bears like to compare Japan in the 1960s and China in 2010. Bulls say the comparison offers China a well-trodden path to a modern, high-tech economic future. Bears point to Japan’s asset bubbles in the 1980s, the subsequent crash, and the lost decade that followed.
Today a note by MF Global’s Nicholas Smith - provocatively entitled ‘The Sweatshop that Roared’ - came out on the side of the bears, warning that 1960s Japan was in much better shape than today’s China, principally because of one thing: education.
While policymakers in the western world fret about the many millions of graduates being churned out of China’s universities every year, Smith points not to the number, but to the quality of those graduates. Take engineers:
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