” a Chinese American - says that you cannot accept the financial figures of Chinese companies or the government - their books are not trustworthy.”
You don’t have to accept government figures if you don’t want. Simply go there and believe your lying eyes. If you had gone there 20 years ago (like I did) and you go there now, it’s like night and day in terms of standard of living. From 30 years ago the change is even more dramatic.
“Or, taking your statement as fact, one could say any benefit of the productivity spurt from U.S. companies from the technological revolution was EXPORTED to China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan, with a “screw the American worker and domestic economy” stamp on it.”
True but that does not counter the point that high tech has created tens of millions of jobs, either here or abroad. If many of them were exported that is a political issue, not a job creation issue.
“Once they are built out as far as needed, that job engine will be much slower, robotics and automation will be even higher, with even slower job growth, for their 1 bil plus populations.”
Of course, as their wages begin to approach ours their growth rate will be more like ours. That is to be expected and has nothing to do with automation. The same thing happened to Japan in the 80’s as their wages rose to our level.
It is not a question of living standards in China having risen, and that fact is regardless of how trustworthy the financial books in China - government OR PRIVATE - can be trusted. They can’t.
Japan has been stagnant economically for one reason - building it’s export driven economy produced robotics & automation & information computerization on an economy wide level faster than everyone else. Job growth has run out.