PrintingNews.com

In the printing industry, China evokes decidedly mixed emotions. United States, German, and Japanese printing equipment and software suppliers see a huge market when they look beyond the Bamboo Curtain. Smaller U.S. and Canadian printers, on the other hand, see a burgeoning print capability that looms as a potential competitor both on local levels and on the global scene.

Some medium-sized commercial printers have found, or are seeking, Chinese partners with which they can work on especially competitive jobs. Large printers such as RR Donnelley and Transcontinental see still another market where their capabilities might lead to dominance, and most already have printing plants or partnerships in place. Book publishers and greeting card producers have already moved a great deal of their production to China, where labor costs are a mere fraction of those in North America. To put all this in perspective, Printing News looked at both the Chinese printing industry and the Chinese economy, with an eye toward the effect they have on U.S. printers.

1.3 Billion Consumers

Several factors make China a significant player in the global printing industry and in the overall global economy. The sheer size of the country alone makes it important; at 3,695,500 square miles in area, China is the fourth largest nation on the globe, following Russia, Canada, and the United States, in that order.

In population, however, China ranks number one, just edging out India with its estimated 1,306,313,800 Chinese citizens in July 2007, or more than four times the U.S. population of 295,734,100, and nearly 40 times that of Canada.

Not only does China have a much larger population than the United States, but easing of the "one child" requirement, and the Chinese birth rate of an estimated 13.25 births per 1,000 population means that it is expected to grow at approximately the same rate as the United States, where the birth rate is 14.14 births per thousand.

The corresponding death rate in China is 6.97 deaths per 1,000 population, compared with 8.26 deaths per thousand in the United States, reflecting a significantly younger population in China. Moreover, with 71.4 percent of the Chinese population in their productive years ranging from 15 to 64 years of age, versus only 67.2 percent of the U.S. population, the Chinese workforce is not only nearly five times that of the United States, it is growing in relative size.

China has not loomed large in the global economy or in the worldwide printing industry because until very recently, the Chinese lived in a closed economy, and exchanged few goods and services with the rest of the world. In 1981, Deng Xiaoping initiated his responsibility system for Chinese farmers, and thus began the inexorable march bringing China into the world economy. In 1984, Deng Xiaoping concluded the deal which would return Hong Kong to China, and in 1992, he toured southern China, further spurring economic reform and charting the course China remains on today.

Chinese citizens—most of whom are significantly better off than in the recent past—regard Deng Xiaoping much more highly than Mao Zedong, who is somewhat discredited despite being the revolutionary who formed modern China. In the past 15 years, China has become a manufacturing powerhouse, and neither Wal-Mart shelves nor the world's manufacturing economies will ever be the same.