> the West always falls for the promise of this huge Chinese market Historically, the only thing that the West was ever able to successfully import into China

> the West always falls for the promise of this huge Chinese market Historically, the only thing that the West was ever able to successfully import into China was opium, and even that was a small window before native production became cheaper than shipping it all the way from India or Turkey. Over the long haul, China has had millenia-long trade surpluses, to the point that Roman writers were complaining about the trade through the Red Sea in spices and silks siphoning off their gold and silver, and later on so much of the silver of Mexico and Potosi ending up in China that it destabilized their bimetallic currency system.