Rebecca Blumenstein, right, with parents Harold and Ruth Blumenstein of Essexville. China Undergoing Accelerated Industrial Revolution
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General Motors already is there, spending $250 million on a corporate campus in Shanghai.
Dow Chemical is there, planning to spend $500 million for a headquarters, forming a joint venture with a Kuwaiti oil company to gain entree to the Chinese market and investing a total of $5 billion (see related story this issue).
And, Bay City's Don Widener is there, recently assigned by GM to move from plant manager at Bay City GM PowerTrain to a plant in China.
The 2008 Summer Olympics will be held there next August, putting the world's spotlight on what is happening there.
There, of course, is China, where everything seems to be made and where the action is in business and trade.
Ah, but the world is so small these days!
When the corporate chiefs call a news conference they'll likely be dealing with another local Michigan person, Rebecca Blumenstein, graduate of Essexville-Hampton Garber High and the University of Michigan.
Ms. Blumenstein is chief of the China Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, based in Beijing.
She draws stares walking with her three children in Tianamen Square since Chinese are limited by law to one child per family.
She spoke last week at a meeting of the Pinconning-Standish Rotary Club in Pinconning and gave insights into China, including her assessment that China is undergoing an industrial revolution in 20 years that took 200 years for the U.S. and Europe.
A local wag said she was the most important speaker in Pinconning since Arthur Summerfield, Postmaster General under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, returned in the 1950s to receive the key to the city. Summerfield was a Pinconning native.
A reporting team headed by Ms. Blumenstein recently won the Pulitzer Prize award for international reporting, "for its sharply edged reports on the adverse impact of China's booming capitalism on conditions ranging from inequality to pollution." The award goes to the "Wall Street Journal staff".
The Journal's China bureau chief Rebecca Blumenstein told a Chinese news agency that her team had not been expecting to win because the 2006 winner for international reporting was also a series of China stories by Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley of New York Times.
Title of the prize-winning series was: "Raucous Industrial Revolution Echoes Era of American Robber Barons a Century Ago."
Aside from Blumenstein, reporters who worked on the series were James Areddy, Andrew Browne, Jason Dean, Gordon Fairclough, Mei Fong, Shai Oster and Jane Spencer.
The team may soon be at the eye of the storm since five of the seven, excluding Browne and Dean, but also including Andrew Batson and Jason S.L. Leow, fired off a stinging letter to the Dow Jones controlling shareholders last May protesting the bid by controversial news media baron Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. to take over the Journal.
"Murdoch has a well-documented history of making editorial decisions in order to advance his business interests in China and, indeed, of sacrificing journalistic integrity to satisfy personal or political aims," the China team wrote.
Murdoch has since taken over the WSJ amid much media consternation.
Conditions in China were the prime focus of Ms. Blumenstein's talk in Pinconning last Thursday noon at the Third Street Deli to about 30 Rotary members, many from Bay City.
"Never before in history has an economy grown 10 percent a year for 10 years in a row," she exclaimed.
"Although there is a real feeling of upward mobility, it is a cruel system with no health care where people have to bring cash to the hospital if they want care."
The government is all powerful, regulation and checks and balances don't exist and all is focused on increasing Gross Domestic Product, she said.
Corruption is rampant in this Dickensian nightmare that features the worst of industrial pollution and exploitation of workers. However, she noted, "this is one of the most important markets for any multi-national corporation."
Even though she doesn't speak Chinese and most of her staff does, Ms. Blumenstein said her job as bureau chief is to provide the perspective about what American readers want to hear about China.
The statistics are mind boggling to say the least:
1.3 billion people, 70 percent of whom are still peasants;
The biggest cell phone market in the world with cell phone users numbering twice the entire population of the United States;
The world's second largest auto market and still at levels comparable to 1915 in the U.S.;
Per-capita income of $1,700 a year, compared with about $40,000 in the U.S.;
Pollution is so bad that the Chinese government may have to shut down all the factories in Beijing so the Olympics may be held, she said. Otherwise, runners and other athletes might not be able to breathe.
The Olympics may provide a forum for protesters to create big trouble, she said. "How China reacts to something unexpected, if it is brutally, could turn a shining moment to something awful."
To put the size of China in perspective, Michigan has a population of about 9 million. China has 100 cities each with more than 10 million people.
"There is not enough energy in the world for them to live like we do," she said.
She earned a bachelor's degree in Economics and Social Science from the University of Michigan.
Her Journalism career began at the Tampa (FL) Tribune and Long Island Newsday. She won a New York Newswomen's Award for best deadline writing for coverage of the Long Island Railroad shootings and in 2003 was part of a team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for deadline writing for coverage of the WorldCom scandals.
Ms. Blumenstein joined the WSJ in 1995 as a reporter in the Detroit bureau, served as chief of the New York Technology Group and was reporter and deputy chief covering telecommunications.###
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