That has no bearing on my point. US companies purposefully outsourced to China

...in part because fierce domestic competition within China drove quality up and prices down and in part because of Chinese protectionism.

These days Chinese protectionism is not necessary to keep the offshoring train running and only American protectionism will arrest it.

The US outsourced to China because of cheap labor, not because Chinese products are good--precisely because US companies were competing with each other and needed ways to reduce prices and improve margins.

That this ultimately had the effect of diminishing the manufacturing base in the US doesn't speak to the ability of US or Chinese companies to compete.

China is a centrally planned economy. To argue it's more competitive than the US is again not tenable.

>The US outsourced to China because of cheap labor

Yeah, in 2003. The US offshores to Bangladesh or vietnam for cheap labor now and has for a long time.

Manufacturing is offshored to China simply because it cant be done in the US at anything resembling a reasonable cost, not because labor is cheaper. That is because the Chinese industrial ecosystem is unparalleled.

>China is a centrally planned economy. To argue it's more competitive than the US is again not tenable.

The economic dogma of the late 90s is getting a little long in the tooth now. Not least because it was completely blindsided by the rise of China.

It turned out that the most effectively run economies were a hybrid of distributed and centrally planned (China has open internal markets while credit allocation is largely centrally planned).