I attended a top 5 business school in France at the turn of the century. We had partnerships with similar schools in NYC, Tokyo, Sydney, you name it. It was ta

I attended a top 5 business school in France at the turn of the century. We had partnerships with similar schools in NYC, Tokyo, Sydney, you name it. It was taught in first year of international business classes that outsourcing abroad was functionally equivalent to a transfer of technology — so you always had to factor in the time it took for your magic low-cost solution to fade out and become your competitor, essentially, but not just them: by then the whole market has access to that cost structure, so you have to keep finding new lower-cost solutions, and keep innovating on your technological part (HQ in Europe, USA, Japan, etc). It's just international business 101, really, and has been for at least 20 years in my personal experience — but I'm pretty sure I read articles from the 1970s describing this process, because Japan was the first one to pull it off brilliantly. People focus on China because somebody is waiving that name a lot and his voice carries a lot through the media; but this is definitely just how the world works, and has been forever — if you ask workers from the next village to come and help build stuff with your super tech, it won't take long before they replicate the process over there. And that's called culture, knowledge, it lives and grows and moves like populations of viruses or molecules, it's been modeled for some time in anthropology at that macro-level.