Comment by pydry

>The US outsourced to China because of cheap labor

Yeah, in 2003. The US offshores to Bangladesh or vietnam for cheap labor now and has for a long time.

Manufacturing is offshored to China simply because it cant be done in the US at anything resembling a reasonable cost, not because labor is cheaper. That is because the Chinese industrial ecosystem is unparalleled.

>China is a centrally planned economy. To argue it's more competitive than the US is again not tenable.

The economic dogma of the late 90s is getting a little long in the tooth now. Not least because it was completely blindsided by the rise of China.

It turned out that the most effectively run economies were a hybrid of distributed and centrally planned (China has open internal markets while credit allocation is largely centrally planned).