[A. Pole]

She spends her evenings in the factory dormitory in the smoggy industrial boomtown of Dongguan, sharing a room with five other migrants from the inner provinces and reading romance novels. Starting at 8:30 a.m., she works in a crowded concrete complex of 600 workers that clangs at capacity. Not counting breaks to eat, she puts in 10-hour days, six days a week, helping build kitchen appliances sold in U.S. stores under the Nesco brand. She makes 27 cents an hour.
[...]
Deng's post-reform nation has lifted a phenomenal 400 million people out of poverty, the World Bank estimates. "This," said former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, "is the fastest change in human history."
[...]
According to Beijing's economic master plan, China will double its $1.236 trillion-a-year economy in the coming decade. In the following 10 years, it will double it again, Cheng said. By then, China will attain an affluent, or xiaokong, society after more than a century of famine, civil war, Leninism and occupation. Cheng knows the "20-year strategy" sounds like daydreams outside of Asia

It is great that the largest nation in the world has chance to move out of poverty in 20 years! But while this is going to happen, United States need to have the "economic master plan"/wise national policy too. Blaming unions, lazy workers, welfare/safety net, regulations and public schools is not enough.

Waiting for the "free market" to make a correction will be way too expensive - the trade can be balanced by the unregulated market through the collapse of US dollar to the level that will make Chinese imports too expensive. It is not feasible socially and politically.

A mad cow problem is a good ilustration of the folly of free market fundamentalism. Freemarketeers preferred voluntary "ban" on feeding cows with carrion over mandating natural the vegetarian diet. Free market will intervene in the end but in a destructive way.

[Glenn]

Two words worry me about all this: unintended consequences.

One wrong move and we might all wind up scrambling for hard scrabble land on which to grow a subsistance crop.

[Redcloak]

Perhaps a good "5-year plan" is on order, eh Comrade?

[superloser]

Excellent article, much thanks for the ping!

[junta]

bump

[Jim Cane]

She spends her evenings in the factory dormitory in the smoggy industrial boomtown of Dongguan, sharing a room with five other migrants from the inner provinces and reading romance novels.

Let's see. If you pen a bodice-ripper and then sell it at the low, low cost of one dollar and market it to the 100 million or so chinese women in the romance pulp demographic - it's a pretty good pay day.