China creates jobs in the U.S.
Country invested $14B here in 2013
By Associated Press
PINE HILL, Ala. — Burdened with Alabama’s highest unemployment rate, long abandoned by textile mills and furniture plants, Wilcox County, Ala., desperately needs jobs.
They’re coming, and from a most unlikely place: Henan Province, China, 7,600 miles away.
Henan’s Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group opened a plant here last month. It will employ more than 300 in a county known less for job opportunities than for lakes filled with bass.
“Jobs that pay $15 an hour are few and far between,” says Dottie Gaston, an official in nearby Thomasville.
What’s happening in Pine Hill is starting to happen across America.
After decades of siphoning jobs from the U.S., China is creating some. Chinese companies invested a record $14 billion here last year. Collectively, they employ more than 70,000 Americans, up from virtually none a decade ago.
Powerful forces — narrowing wage gaps, tumbling U.S. energy prices, the vagaries of currency markets — are pulling Chinese companies across the Pacific.
In March, Dothan, Ala., held a two-day U.S.-China manufacturing symposium, drawing dozens of potential Chinese investors. On sale were T-shirts reading: “Ni hao, y’all” — combining the Chinese version of “hello” with a colloquial Southernism.
Chinese executives wandered around during a street festival, snapping photos of vintage muscle cars. A Chinese company, in a deal negotiated before the symposium, announced it would bring a 3D printing operation to Dothan. Among other Chinese projects in the U.S.:
n In Moraine, Ohio, Chinese glassmaker Fuyao Glass Industry Group is taking over a plant that General Motors abandoned in 2008 and creating at least 800 jobs.
n In Lancaster County, S.C., Chinese textile manufacturer Keer Group is investing $218 million in a plant to make industrial yarn and will employ 500.
n In Gregory, Texas, Tianjin Pipe is investing over $1 billion in a factory that makes pipes for oil and gas drillers. The company will have 400 employees by the end of 2017.
