Stephen Kotkin

And it's going to be T-shirts at the beginning, like the Japanese, and then they're going to climb the value chain until it's the highest value-added products.

And then supply chains are going to change as a result, and nothing is made in one place anymore, and the world gets very complicated.

But the point being is that Deng Xiaoping did that.

That was intentional.

That's the credit that the party deserves and the party never gets because it's a story not of the party's rule alone, but of British Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, United States domestic market.

And so how do you get rich in the modern world?

You sell to America.

Those countries that are partners with America,

and that are able to compete.

The Chinese deserve credit.

They can manufacture higher quality, lower cost products that American consumers will buy.

American consumers are not forced to buy Chinese products.

They're just better and they're cheaper.

And so they buy them because it's a market and there's competition.

So some countries in Bangladesh can do this in textiles.

You referenced Bangladesh, which is how I got...

launched on this reverie that I hope is now ending.

My point being is that the East Asian miracle, which is Japan selling to the American domestic market, followed by South Korea and Taiwan doing the same trick,

and then followed by Deng Xiaoping's Communist China, the same exact trick, filtered through British Hong Kong.

The problem with the Chinese one is that they're not allies.