It worked for China. The reason why it isn't working for America is that Americans don't want to and aren't ready to reduce their standard of living in order to re-industrialize. Poorer countries don't have that problem. Furthermore, America has high employment already, many poor countries have high supply of labor. Anyone who thinks automation will somehow lock in industrialization in countries that are already industrialized at the expense of everybody else and keep them in a permanent poverty trap is not thinking seriously. The world will become horrifically unbalanced and so you folks better be ready for illegal migrants crossing borders. Serious governments will start demanding industrial investments otherwise good luck sourcing your raw materials.
China does what China has to do so I guess that's fair. China doesn't get flak because it doesn't have colonial baggage and they aren't evangelical about promoting human rights, democracy, etc. In short, it's much easier to deal with because it doesn't interfere in a country's internal affairs, it just does deals and leaves. China wants commodities to feed it's mighty industry, it will work for as long as it is an alternative to the west and their arrogance with them acting like they're the supreme beings that should dominate everybody. However, a time will come when the world will have to balance itself, folks are not going to accept being permanent importers of Chinese products, local industrial investments will have to be on the table even if it's just basic assembly.
That’s pretty insulting to the hard work and sacrifice of generations of Chinese people to dismiss all of their collective sacrifices and the hardships they endured as just being cheaper labour and having poorer standards of living.
If high unemployment and low standards of living were truly the only ingredients needed for world beating manufacturing, India would be king of light manufacturing already.
Chinese bosses are almost always ruthlessly efficient and profit driven in business decisions. They would not be incurring the additional expenses of taking Chinese workers abroad for projects if local talent was remotely good enough.
On top of that you have entirely different leagues of scaling in terms of market size and industrial potential. It’s no great exaggeration to say that for any random 3rd world country to think they can emulate China and mimic its success is akin to your local corner shop saying it can be the next Amazon or AliExpress or Temu by merely copy pasting their business model and strategy. Even if you do everything exactly the same you cannot remotely compete because of the cosmic size difference.
That is not to say the 3rd world will get a worse deal or even the same shitty deal with China as they currently get from the west. At a minimum China will not seek to rent seek and gate keep to purposefully stunt 3rd world development through predatory finance structures and self-serving exploitative terms masquerading as independent economic advice.
The 3rd world will get a far better deal from China than they could ever dream of from the west, as China will given them fair and even generous win-win deals that benefit all, as opposed to the western min-max-fuck model where the west pays the minimum price possible to extract the maximum amount of profit from the 3rd world and fuck them if they starve as a result.
However, it would also be a grave mistake to take Chinese generosity as weakness and develop a totally unwarranted sense of entitlement that just because China is richer than it somehow owes the 3rd world a better life. Play that kind of bullshit game and be prepared to be annihilated by Chinese competition if not hard power if anyone is delusional enough to think they can just rob China of assets on a national scale and not suffer consequences.
As for your rather telling blackmailing remark about floods of immigrants, well again, that bullshit won’t work with China like it does with the woke west. If you think illegal immigration into China is anything like it is with the west, for your own good, don’t test that theory yourself. Let’s just say China has zero reservations about sending people right back to where they came from. And if you really try China’s patience with repeated attempts, you should be careful what you wish for, as China has a lot of desert and could always use more volunteers to help plant more trees.
