Obviously, but I was in a hurry and it got you to do a nice job of penning the summary. I just wish the posters here would set aside their obsession with labor costs for an understanding of the costs of regulation in that 'overhead' component here in the US. IMO, it's a bigger reason for driving production offshore (deliberately and with the same beneficiaries) than is the cost of labor.
As to the yuan, that was pegged as a way for the Chinese elites to accumulate cash at the expense of savers. With a labor pool the size of theirs, they could get away with it, for at least a decade or two. The consequence was the need to both appease labor and to find a way to use the cash to consolidate power and transform historic urban squalor into a secure police state. For a long time they parked excess young people in the military, but that's just as much a long term threat as it is a way to maintain power. Hence Agenda21 instacities, mass transportation, etc. Now all they have to do is to fill them. They will, and at gunpoint if necessary.
It's happening here too obviously, but the trend will be to squeeze the burbs back into 'safe zones' within urban hell. At that point, whether China or the US, the 'gun to the head' will be the threat to simply cut the electrical power.
I don't think that's correct. Every East Asian country that has adopted the Japanese export model, including China, has pegged its currency to the dollar, with dirty floats being the rule. It's mooted as a way of keeping costs for domestic and foreign investors predictable, and preventing a rapid escalation in local costs. Has it been beneficial for their economies? I can't really tell, because every one of them has done more or less the same thing. I suspect this is because everyone of them knows that what came out of the Japanese economic sausage machine tastes good, but nobody knows which sausage ingredient can be left out and still produce equally good results.