Industrialization worked for China recently for the same reason it worked for western nations more than a century ago: you can drive local economic growth even

Industrialization worked for China recently for the same reason it worked for western nations more than a century ago: you can drive local economic growth even if the population has low education. Once you have a strong local economy based on manufacturing, you have to drive innovation to sustain it. So you use the economic output to fund education and research, to create new categories of products and services, which create durable competitive advantage. The U.S. has succeeded wildly with this playbook. China is currently following this playbook. The author is saying that the playbook in Northern England was interrupted by the South.