The “China miracle” was nothing more than smoke and mirrors as big companies of the West took advantage of Chinese people seeking a living and Western consumers seeking lower prices. Everyone lost. There was no “miracle”.
The fad for cutting costs and quick investment returns nickeled and dimed away quality, eventually pushing bean counters to fall in love with China’s underpaid labor force. When China opened for business in 1978, the shipments rolled in. Wealth wasn’t made, it was only rearranged. A large shipping freighter made a large wake, some sunbathers had to move their towels on the beach when the wave wrecked the sand castles, and the global economist footsie-frat claimed that the sea levels had permanently risen.
Perhaps the label was wishful thinking, perhaps it was a malicious deception, but it wasn’t Chinese propaganda; it was globalist propaganda. China’s “growing economy” was fueled by an exchange between a planned economy and the free markets of the world. Whatever wave came, it would lower, eventually balance out, and could never have endured any more than spilled crude oil mixes with wildlife on the beach.
The mainstream Western press kept reporting on the “Chinese miracle”, encouraging Beijing that China’s new economy was here to stay. Western globalist economists should have known better, maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but China is paying the price of the inevitable. Eventually, either the Western economies would collapse—then the one-way flow of cash into China would stop as it did after the opium wars—or a Donald Trump would come along and stop the flow before it got that far. But, it wasn’t going to last. The biggest victim of the bean-counter coupon-clipper culture of the West is China. And, making victims reaps nothing more than ill will.
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