So what they are trying to say in this article is that all of those manufacturing industries such as watch making, shoe making, textiles and the like never really left the USA, but instead are making prducts so efficiently these days that machines are doing all the work.
Or maybe manufacturers are in stealth mode, making everything here, shipping it all to China, and shipping it back thus making it look like the tags that say “made in china” are true so they can receive a tax write off of some kind.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
That reminds me of something I heard recently about commercial fishing in the Atlantic, IIRC. It was cheaper to catch the fish in the Atlantic, ship them to China to have them fileted, and ship them back to Europe, than to do it all in Europe.