PrintFebruary 6, 2011
Exporting Our Prosperity to China
America's technological lead is melting down as its innovations are increasingly transferred to China as the cost of doing business. China's rise in the global economy began as a desire to lure American manufacturing to its shores with the promise of cheap labor, then shifted to demands for substantial American investment as a precondition to entry, and has finally morphed into demands that companies transfer their core intellectual property to Chinese manufacturers as the cost of doing business in China. America tolerated the transfer of low-wage low-skill manufacturing to China in the 1990s reasoning that capital would be freed up for application to higher level manufacturing, and ignored objections from those who warned that the disappearance of low-skill manufacturing would displace an economic group with few options to recover. American manufacturers rushed into China to take advantage of its cheap labor with little understanding of the long term implications of issues such as...(Read Full Article)
