[Vision2020] One more reason that China will bury us

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

Last year I heard an interview with the head of the Port of Long Beach.  She was listing the number of ships loaded with Chinese goods, most of them destined for Walmart Stores.  When the interviewer ask her what went back in the empty ships, she replied: scrap iron, paper, and few other raw materials that I've now forgotten.  

Are we becoming a Chinese colony?  Some of their best graduates are also colonizing our math and science departments as well.

Nick Gier

January 16, 2007, The New York Times
Blazing a Paper Trail in China
By DAVID BARBOZA

HONG KONG — Just five years ago, Zhang Yin and her husband were driving around the United States in a used Dodge minivan begging garbage dumps to give them their scrap paper.

She and her husband, who was trained as a dentist, had formed a company in the 1990s to collect paper for recycling and ship it to China. It was a step up from life back in Hong Kong, where she had opened a paper trading company with $3,800 to cash in on China’s chronic paper shortages.

“I remember what a man in the business told me back then,” Ms. Zhang said. “He said, ‘Wastepaper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation.’ ”

Ms. Zhang took that memory all the way to the bank. As a result of her entrepreneurship, Zhang Yin (pronounced Jang Yeen) is now among the richest women anywhere in the world, including Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and eBay’s chief executive, Meg Whitman. Her personal wealth is estimated at $1.5 billion or more, with members of her family worth billions more.

Her companies take heaps of waste paper from the United States and Europe, ship it to China and recycle it into corrugated cardboard, which is then used for boxes that are packed with toys, electronics and furniture that is stamped “Made in China” and often shipped right back across the ocean to American consumers.

After the boxes are thrown away, the cycle starts all over again.

Late last year, Forbes magazine named Ms. Zhang the wealthiest woman in China. She may even be the richest self-made woman in the world, challenging a handful of others, like Giuliana Benetton, who started the clothing company with her brothers, and Rosalia Mera, who co-founded Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer, with her former husband.

Most of the world’s richest women inherited their wealth: from the Walton women of Wal-Mart fame to the daughters of the men who created Mars candy bars, L’Oréal cosmetics and BMW.

But not Ms. Zhang. A petite 49-year-old woman with a cherubic smile and a fancy for diamonds, she started out from a modest background, the daughter of a military officer. Now she dominates the world’s paper trade through her giant companies, one centered in Dongguan just outside Hong Kong and the other based in Los Angeles.

“She’s a visionary,” says Herman Woo, an analyst at BNP Paribas, which helped her paper company list shares in Hong Kong. “She doesn’t mind putting a lot of money in at the beginning, to build the company.”

Rest of article deleted.