They had a shot at democracy which ended at Tiananmen Square (the students there even made their own statue of liberty). But Deng decided to crush it and we've been living in a la-la land, convinced that getting rich would persuade party apparatchiks that being rich is a good replacement for being powerful. I was hopeful too. We didn't see that rich wasn't a replacement for rich *and* powerful, D'Oh!

We got decades of intellectual property transfer (nicest way I can phrase it) culminating in 'wolf warrior' diplomats and military development using AI based on Western technology. Then the Trump administration bumbled their way into discovering that export controls on tech packed a wallop (Huawei). Non-trumpie here. IMO they were mostly idiots - but Trump got into office because the '44 Bretton Woods accords gave up US manufacturing *on purpose* so the world could rebuild - and as a bribe to keep them out of the Sov sphere. His "Chyna!" refrain was about that - even though the jobs mostly went to automation. Lots of those people had a legit beef with the rest of us.

Meanwhile, the US has been backing away from BW ever since the USSR collapsed, so blue water shipping is about to get more expensive, raising the cost of geographically distant production stages - and once it's more expensive than the differential saved it makes economic sense to re-shore.

I'm oversimplifying. Hey, it's a response and I've run my fingers too much already :-)