Literally 30 years ago, when I was just a kid taking an interest, I predicted this, not because I'm so smart, but because lots of others at the time were predicting something similar and I thought they made sense. Manufacturing is the kind of thing that a big autocratic nation can be good at, you mobilise huge amounts of labour, attract Western capital, and grow very rapidly by making things cheaply at huge volumes. But the biggest part of that cheapness is labour cost, and that never stays low once the economy develops. And so China would need to move to value added manufacturing (which they're doing but not at the required scale) and services. The thing with services and high tech is that they require the free flow of information to grow rapidly. The CCP hates free flowing information, so companies can never be certain of the data they're working with. I didn't believe then that an autocratic nation could run a modern technology and services economy to compete with the West, and I still don't now. THIS is where the old idea came from that the modernisation of China would one day lead to democracy. It's not that it would inevitably happen, it's that one day, China would be forced to choose between continued high growth at the cost of autocratic control, or autocratic control at the cost of high growth. They chose the later, so now here we are.