[A. Pole]

[durasell:] Take a typical guy making high end wood tables. He's got maybe a half dozen people working for him making the tables. [...] So, how does this guy expand into the dozens of high end shops springing up in China? How does he ship the stuff there?

You got it wrong. The question is, how can he give the boot to this "half dozen people working for him" in America (whom he knows personally for a long time) and persuade them to train low paid Chinese in China to take their jobs?

And how to maintain the control over this outsourced production while maintaing the quality and keeping the US buyers happy ("high end" might get lower) and preventing Chinese from taking over/copying his product.

I guess in smaller scale business these problems are more difficult or maybe more visible.

[durasell]

There are a lot of jobs and products that can't be outsourced. Cheap manufacturing only works for products that are produced in large quantities and there are tons of U.S. companies producing unique, high quality products that required skilled labor. The trick is expanding the market for these companies...