It's a combination of more freedom and relentlessly stealing the IP of already successful nations, building the same thing for much cheaper, and putting them out of business.
When your biggest resource is people, it's much cheaper and more effective to just take something that someone else has poured billions of dollars into for R&D than to build it yourself.
Maybe that "AJR" trio of academics should have added a historian? Because anyone who thinks China is unique in being a big economic success story is profoundly ignorant of history.
When your biggest resource is people, it's much cheaper and more effective to just take something that someone else has poured billions of dollars into for R&D than to build it yourself.
The steel industry is a good example of this.