of  recent very fast chinese growth. You can sense such perception at forums of both 'right' or 'left' sites. Most of them have little idea the scale of the chinese economy.

Simple facts:1)Labour intensive/lo-value-added factory jobs did help to provide employment to rural migrants and helped urbanisation BUT

2)Foreign investment constitute only a small % of total investment in China and the yankie portion only amounted to a small fraction of the total foreign investment. Nor those setups were of hi profit margins to greatly help tax revenue. China has been investing literally trillions(US$) per yr in recent yrs and yankie investment comparatively are just peanuts. Show them some numbers.

http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/201802/t20180228_1585631.html

3)If they brag about yankie TOT to china, ask them to show some examples. Remind them china produce 47% and  >50% of world's steel and aluminum and china is under severe yankie tech sanction.  Ask them which steel plants are invested by the yanks. You don't really need to mention hi-speed rail, tell them china has 1.6 times(at 1.777 billion kilowatt) the electric power generation of the yanks and the US cost to built a 1 million kilowatt plant(+logistics,geologicals) is about US$2 billion.

Yankie manufacturing is not declining in values, just manpowers are replaced by automation and service industries grow faster.

4)The trade imbalance is distorting because only a fraction of the values of the products(say apple phones)were addded in china. Chinese must work hard to save money to import yankie CPU. One way or the other, we subsidized US micro-electronics R&D

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/05/11/if-us-manufacturing-hasnt-declined-then-we-dont-have-to-explain-the-decline-of-us-manufacturing/#10d61b1d3d87