CHINESE CONNECTIONS MAY MEAN MORE JOBS.

Byline: JULIA M. SCOTT

Staff Writer

If Katherine Whitman has her way, the ebb of San Fernando Valley manufacturing jobs may turn into a positive flow.

For the past two decades Whitman has cultivated relationships with Chinese firms as treasurer of the Valley's International Trade Association, at her global consulting company Pomegranate International, and as a professor of international business at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles.

Recently, Whitman was tapped by the Chinese government to recruit Valley companies making high-tech equipment to come to an expo planned for next year in Suzhou, China, where scores of manufacturers are looking to upgrade the equipment in their factories.

If orders for equipment made here snowball, local companies will need to expand. And that could mean new, high-paying manufacturing jobs.

One company that could potentially benefit is Fadal Machining Centers in Chatsworth. Fadal makes high-end cutting equipment used in the automotive and medical industries, among others.

"If you can get high paying jobs in the Valley because of higher sales, it's a win-win," Whitman said during an interview in her cozy Mount St. Mary's office, which is decorated with mementos from her 52 trips to China.

Whitman was chosen to promote and organize the expo because of her connections forged over those many trips, said Gu Guangmin, a science and technology diplomat at the Chinese Consulate in L.A.

"She's very familiar with the Chinese," Guangmin said.

The Valley hasn't seen a significant increase in manufacturing jobs since the 1980s, aside from minor blips in the late 1990s and 2000.

Still, there are people who believe Whitman's connections will lead to more jobs in the Valley.

Bruce Ackerman, president of the Economic Alliance in the Valley, which oversees VITA, has seen rising interest in doing international business.

The number of calls his office fields from delegations abroad wanting to visit have grown so much in the past five years that Ackerman assigned a staff member to handle them. By the same token, there are plenty here that are eager to connect with companies in China, he said.

"How do I communicate with Chinese companies?" said Ackerman, repeating a question he often hears. "It's like the needle in the haystack."

Not everyone is so optimistic about the potential for more jobs coming to the Valley.

Whitman would have to be "really successful" to see jobs added, said Daniel Blake, director of the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge.

That's because intense national and international competition has created a disconnect between output and manufacturing jobs, according to a report Blake authored that was released Thursday.

The report, called the CSUN Economic Forecast for the San Fernando Valley, says California's manufacturers increased output by 85 percent between 1993 and 2000, but only needed an average of 9.6 more workers to reach that goal.

Gains in productivity, which is measured in output per worker, most often come from buying better equipment or creating a more efficient distribution system -- not hiring more workers.

The two countries do plenty of business together. Each year the U.S. imports $231 billion more goods from China than it exports there, an imbalance higher than with any other country.

Now the Valley has a chance to export more goods to China, namely high-tech computers and equipment that can digitize factories.

China needs to upgrade its factories to make higher quality goods or its could face a tough economic cycle that sent Japan into a slump in the 1990s, Whitman said. She has toured many Chinese factories outfitted only to make cheap plastic products, items that can easily be made elsewhere.

Without the upgrades, China's output could be undercut by countries with even cheaper sources of labor, like Vietnam or Cambodia.

The expo, planned for March 2008 in Suzhou, a regional manufacturing center about 75 miles west of Shanghai, will give local and Chinese companies the chance to network.

China is much different than the country she experienced on her first visit, in 1987.

Back then, Whitman went to China because of her teaching expertise in market economics.

Sister Magdalen Coughlin, who was president of Mount St. Mary's then, sent three teachers to China to improve connections with the country as part of a commission she was serving on.

For a month Whitman taught classes of 600 students. But she was not impressed with the country because there was very little electricity and few people believed they could one day own a car.

China turned out to be a perfect testing ground for her passion, economic development. Whitman returned dozens of times during the next 20 years and doesn't plan to stop any time soon.

"I suddenly realized that I had a laboratory right in front of me," Whitman said, "and I can watch the experiments."

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Photo:

(color) Katherine Whitman is helping recruit Valley companies that make high-tech equipment to an expo in Suzhou, China.

John McCoy/Staff Photographer