China will stay a big center of global manufacturing — it's still reasonably cheap, it has the infrastructure, it has the roads and the ports, and it has the supply chain. But that is slowly changing, which is why you're going to see more companies shift their manufacturing to other places: ultra-cheap southeast Asia, Mexico (which has raised its productivity significantly), and fingers-crossed maybe even to the United States.
This is from vox.com, whose main claim to fame as far as I knew was luring Ezra Klein over from the Washington Post. With more stories like this maybe they can permanently establish themselves as a new, interesting news source.
The other major China story going around seems to be that China's economy has eclipsed that of the US if you look at PPP, which is true but inspires the most awful articles about how the US must surely be doomed this time. The real question, I think, is why China? What about India?
Amartya Sen has an answer for that question, taken from last year's NYT (and bonus analysis c/o the World Bank). It's worth a read--his rough answer is that India is a democracy, and it's made a tradeoff for greater democracy instead of economic growth-- but I wasn't sure whether he really offered any solutions. Stating that India is a democracy is true, but I don't know whether it answers the Really Big Question: what can India do to jump-start its long-awaited economic growth?
(I found several references to India's economy as "the sleeping elephant." China of course is a dragon, a half-awake one or something. I await economic reporting on the giant beaver to our north, or the punchy 'roos of Australia. Surely it's only a matter of time.)
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