They’re rats on a wheel, or more bluntly, our prison b-; they build a lot of different things for the US market, and recycle some of that trade dollar surplus into US gov’t debt in order to keep the Yuan-USD exchange rate stable. They can’t let the Yuan rise, or they lose the US market, and therefore have to keep buying our debt.
The workers in China don’t make much at all, so even though they build all kinds of products, like the Japanese before them they are looking for offshore production capacity with labor costs cheap enough to sell into the Chinese market. They tried Latin America years ago, but that failed because, well, it’s Latin America.
Since then they’ve had an eye on Africa, but seem to have backed off due to the Islamofascist craziness and violence that’s spreading out like mad. They’ve got some investment in Sudanese oil (for obvious reasons), have had for over ten years, but the high price of oil is one of the problems for their economy as well.
I think agricultural production has climbed slightly, but is headed for a stall. There’s also lots of problems with groundwater pollution from their la-dee-dah devil may care attitude about waste disposal. High tech waste worldwide winds up back in China for “recycling” into new tablets, iPods, phones, CPUs, and such, and these recycling operations are zero-capitalized mom and pop operations, often enough done in the open air. Also China burns a lot of coal.
Most of the recycling activity in China is driven by NIMBY policies here in America. So instead of disposing of it in an environmentally sensitive way, we send it to the 3rd World and, due to their lax/absent standards, it becomes pollution.
See horse meat in US for an example of the Prog’s unintended consequences.