By focusing on the subsidiaries, foreign and domestic sales, education levels of employees and R&D (Research & Development) of companies throughout some specific years, Prof. Dallas and I have already examined the manufacturing industry of China, including the electronic factories in details to find out the structure of China’s international trades and estimate how internationalize and competitive China is in world’s trades.
We utilized the online and in-print Chinese to create a database of China’s largest domestic firms throughout the official annual reports of each firm. We divided the work into three different categories including firms in mainland China, HK and Taiwan. Comparing to Taiwanese firms and firms in HK, firms in mainland China were less likely to conduct the manufacturing. Instead, the main business became the services and sales and productions of the intermediate goods (like semiconductors). We recognized that China assembled the intermediate goods into final products by using its cheap labor. Though firms in HK and Taiwan seemed to be more “internationalize” because of the greater foreign subsidiaries and exports and imports, we found out that the main business was less likely being involved in manufacturing process.
All in all, Prof. Dallas and I collected varies of data about firms in different locations in China to map out the internationalize of China. It is complicated to draw out a conclusion because of the unpredictable patterns of Chinese trades. China is indeed becoming more and more internationalize because of the increasing of foreign trades and foreign subsidiaries. However, there are still problems hidden underneath the increment. One of the biggest problems would be the lack of high-tech skills of labor, which causes the assembly of high-tech goods.