Don't think for one minute that China's ascendance is based solely on "western corporate greed". China is no paragon of economic virtue. China has only allowed capitalism because their Communist economic system was falling under its own weight. While the Beijing government is hard line, the smaller, local party bosses had to allow capitalism to invade, else the local citizens would have starved to death. China also doesn't give a rat's behind about emissions, and is the largest consumer of bituminous coal. The recent development of the Yangtze River and its tributaries wasn't an ecological blue print, either.

China uses capitalistic economics to prop up its Communist philosophy. China has also manipulated the value of the Yuan, in order to maintain competitiveness in the global market. China only begrudgingly recognizes some intellectual property, something not inherent in its philosophy. (China is not the only Asian country which does this.)

Labor is not a flexible cost. It's inelastic, and will move to its lowest cost, wherever that may be. Until and unless true free trade becomes a reality, the discussion is merely academic. Countries will always act in their own interests.

Somebody has already commented that China wasn't in the dark ages, and has a much longer history of innovation and cultural development than the USA or its predecessor as a British colony. The communist revolution era was a slow point for China, and yes the dragon has awakened. While I sympathize with your views on China's military and their tactics, essentially they are trying to reclaim their former glory.

However, they also have huge problems ahead. Currently they do have a source of very cheap labor as they have moved people out of a peasant agrarian culture into factories with advanced manufacturing, but even that is beginning to change and we should be paying attention because the same trends are coming in our direction.

The Taiwanese manufacturing behemoth Foxconn employs a huge number of people in factory cities in China, but they are automating at a very aggressive rate: " Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots" http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 . Manufacturing is moving to a whole new level of precision automation and artificial intelligence is raising the level higher still. China's low pay based manufacturing economics are changing, which will create a huge problem for China. What is the country going to do with all those disenfranchised workers?

One consequence of this is that an American robot or AI system costs the same as a Chinese one does, works just as hard, and doesn't need healthcare. It is entirely logical to bring a lot of manufacturing back to the USA, why ship things half way around the world when you can manufacture at the same cost in the USA?

This however will create a huge problem for the USA, and is part of the fallacy of Trump's claims. I'm not trying to make this political, any administration would face the same issues, but while bringing manufacturing back to the USA is entirely feasible it may not create jobs and is quite likely to do just the opposite if companies are going to remain competitive. To paraphrase Jack Swigert and Apollo 13, "Mr. President and Congress, we have a problem here!"

This can't be solved by bullying GM, Ford, or Toyota into not moving manufacturing to Mexico or elsewhere. If companies build new fully automated plants in the USA that bring manufacturing back to the USA but do not create jobs, how does the President or Congress legislate around that? Like it or not, we live in a very rapidly changing global economy and have to remain competitive on a global scale to survive and have to do things intelligently.

Perhaps the only grain of comfort is that China, India and others are likely to impacted at least as badly as we are, if not much more so as offshoring or outsourcing loses its economic benefits.

Please do not take this as a political rant. It is intended as an objective observation on real issues that will affect all of us.