More than anything else, in the 1973 time frame, was the inception of a dialogue with China.
At the time we wouldn’t hear about internal changes in leadership and policies for months or years. This was problematic.
If this were some plot, the opening up of China would have taken place one day, and within months or a year a massive sea change of policy would have become noticeable.
No other big policy changes did become noticeable other than a better communication between the two nations.
It was two decades later when our businesses went whole hog for China.
Oh, it grew, but in a definite direction from the word go.
It wasn’t all tweeting birds and mutual philanthropy.
I had a cheap jacket in 1980 that was made in China. This was among the first of the cheap Chinese goods. Somebody eventually stole it from me.
But anyhow, the factory that made that jacket wasn’t being paid in US corn. It was being paid in US dollars. It became a little success story in China. China saw, and wasn’t stupid based on its own desiderata. How can we turn little success stories into big success stories?
And we see what the result did to the Chinese countryside, because to them success stories just meant more and more and more US dollars.
So anyhow, Donald Trump has a different idea of success story. Dollars are only one side of it. Goods and services and self-respect are the other side of it.
If China had thought that way... which is another way of saying that prosperity comes from heaven, leveraged by work (and hard work will result in a lot of benefit through that leverage)... well, probably its Yangtze would NOT be a sewer, nor would the atmosphere of Peking/Beijing be a cloud of smog.
Both the US and China suffered from a bad concept. Trump is about to spark a revolution in thought in the USA. We don’t begrudge it to the rest of the world, which needs its own Trumps.
Fixed it.