For the first three decades of China’s “opening up”, what they had was not coercive market power but incredibly cheap labor on a huge scale and a stable, pro-bu

For the first three decades of China’s “opening up”, what they had was not coercive market power but incredibly cheap labor on a huge scale and a stable, pro-business government. And what that government did was to play the long game of requiring all foreign businesses wishing to take advantage of the huge, cheap labor force to do so through joint ventures with domestic companies. For the Chinese people, this was exactly the right move, because foreign businesses would never have voluntarily enriched the Chinese labor force and thus driven up their own costs. China is where it is today because, while the Western companies were planning on the scale of quarters, they were looking decades down the road. However, the rest of the world is finally waking up, and China still has tremendous internal structural challenges to sustaining its growth. So whether China will become a dominant force globally still remains to be seen.