I will grant you that institutionalized liberalism, birthed by a thoroughly prostituted educational establishment and fostered by a fourth estate enarmored of political correctness and blind devotion to liberal doctrine, and subsequently nurtured by a venal and corrupt political establishment and it's bastard bureaucracies, has brought us dangerously close to a point where a vast uberclass will be brought into being that will serve as the springboard for these fascists to achieve electoral success in a climate of fear, envy and loathing.
(That was a long sentence, and I'm sorry for that. It's just the way it came out!)
But the fallacy in your historical analysis is that China is NOT to us what we were to Britain. Any success that economy has is due entirely to slave labor. That is not a prescription for success, insofar as national economies go. They have foreign exchange. They have some industrial base. In Manchuria they have natural resources. But they are poor.
They have intellectual capital, yet that capital is not really put to task for building that economy. All markets they serve are overseas markets, designed to bring monetary capital into state coffers, or else put to work to serve the military and/or the state. Their consumer base, as it were, is piddling, and while this country remains a totalitarian communist dictatorship concerned mainly with it's own survival and self-aggrandizement, it will always remain thus. Under this scenario, I feel sorry for those who are waiting for the "billion-plus market" to materialize. It simply is not going to happen.
India? Pakistan? Industrious people. I know a number of them. Very likeable, hard-working, and quite smart. But as long as that area is driven by the caste system, they will suffer a similar fate. An economy that exists to benefit the few cannot work. Never has, never will.
The main reason these countries, these economies, have and utilize this cheap intellectual capital is because we buy it! They don't use this capital because they can't! Those economies are not this economy. They do not have the requisite infrastructure to effectively make use of it. Oh sure, they aspire to it, but they don't have it.
Now, why do we buy it? Why do we need it? Because we have a technologically advanced economy, with established infrastructure, that requires it. A source of cheaper labor has emerged that this economy can consume. Because of the nature of advanced capitalism, the pie will grow to accomodate this new feature in the mix.
It's a fatal mistake to view markets, especially dynamic capitalistic markets, as a zero-sum game. Socialists may view it as such, but they were the last to come around on things like a round earth, so we pretty much expect that from them. Malthusian economics, whether about food, natural resources, or human capital, are not in vogue today because history has already relagated it to it's trash heap.
Because of the incredible economic engine this country is, and because of it's intensely dynamic nature, this economy will find a way to accomodate these changes. If it turns out such an accomodation is not possible, then it likely spells doom for all of us.
David Ben-Gurion once said he thought once China got the technology it would be the only country. We shall see.
CA....