| "And yet they were never able to turn it into economic growth as the West did" Is it really that much of a mystery? China has had different forms of totalitarianism over the last couple of centuries. It's like putting a noose around the neck of economic growth and innovation. The only reason they even saw growth is because the cost of living is still very low in many parts of the country (outside big cities like Beijing) and big businesses can utilize this plus their lax employment laws. They now just copy our innovations (sometimes, rather poorly) and sell them to their much larger, closed market. Many of these hacking attacks we've seen in the last couple of years are done to steal corporate secrets and copy the business: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-great-brain-robbery-c... I know a guy that is a senior engineer at an automotive company. He's originally from China and will go back in a year or so because automotive companies in China are paying Chinese engineers that have worked in the US 3X what they are getting paid here. It won't last long, however. Once they get all of these corporate secrets, engineer wages will go down. China is slowly stealing all of our corporate secrets through hacking, having Chinese students get educated here and then taking secrets back with them, and outright theft of manufacturing plans/molds. |