There's also the issue of power - the Chinese are in control of the whole process of development. No advice from the World Bank or the economics faculty of Chicago or Harvard.
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This sounds exactly right to me.
Several months ago I watched an interesting documentary about Wal Mart's business practices and impact:
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/>
As the correspondent/host, Hedrick Smith, traced the story's threads, all roads -- from a manufacturing point of view -- led to China.
At one point in the film Smith visits an auction where factory equipment previously owned by the departed, once mighty American firm, Rubbermaid, was being sold. The auctioneer tells him that a particularly large, complex and expensive piece of machinery -- designed to turn resin into finished rubber products -- was purchased by a Chinese firm who were disassembling it for shipment back to China.
The Chinese firm was going to pick up where Rubbermaid left off.
This little bit of information, seemingly so insignificant as the daily twists and turns of global capital go, intrigued me. Clearly, although China is dependent on exports to the West (mostly the US I believe) and foreign firms are using Chinese-based manufacturing, contrary to my stereotyped, lefty view of economic imperialism -- i.e. a bunch of white guys from Manhattan, London, Brussels, et. al, parachute in to run the show while workers toil and almost zero local expertise and ownership are developed -- the Chinese are building a vast domestic production infrastructure which they completely manage and enhance.
Rubbermaid wasn't opening a plant in China managed by USers -- the Chinese were creating their own Rubbermaid, supplying finished rubber products to Wal Mart and other Western retailers as well as domestic outlets.
According to Smith, something like 70 percent of Wal Mart's suppliers are receiving their products from Chinese firms. These aren't American owned, yet Chinese based factories: they're Chinese through and through.
This situation, in which the supposedly weaker party possesses a powerful and growing expertise in critical technologies and methods, complicates simple critiques of 'economic imperialism'.
.d.
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