Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"They really do, and it's related to two things: people and migration. Everyone knows China has a lot of people - over a billion people - and actually most of them are still very, very poor. And what's been happening is that millions, millions of these poor, primarily rural folks have been migrating each year to the cities, and moving to those cities in hopes of finding jobs. For simple stability, China has to find jobs for those in-migrants. That's one big reason China has emphasized manufacturing because manufacturing jobs are jobs, in many cases, that can be taken by someone, at least in China, who doesn't have an extensive kind of educational background. Now with the world recession, China's economic growth has slowed. In fact, its growth rate has been cut in half. Indeed, China is so worried about this that they just passed a stimulus plan that is twice as big as the U.S. plan on a relative basis. So this is a long-run problem that China has, how to find jobs for these rural migrants going into the cities, and the recession - the worldwide recession - really isn't helping."