I realize this is a pretty much hopeless task with 99 44/100% of the population, but here goes anyway. Me & that guy from La Mancha live on hope, after all. Advanced economies quite literally "farm out" the low-value stuff; this is why you don't see industrial farming in cities. Nor do you see a lot of low-value manufacturing in NYC. The real estate, never mind everything else, is way too expensive to allow it. So, it happens elsewhere. Back in the old days, the low-value stuff got sent to the farms that were outside the city walls; later on, when farmland became rural, you would see industrial suburbs grow up around the most advanced cities, places like Long Island City in New York, Gary Indiana in the Chicago metro area, or Oakland over by San Fran. These days, that stuff now gets made mostly in China, but also in places like Indonesia and Viet Nam. So, what do the advanced places make? Anyone who ever took a job in an advanced city with a small business learned quickly what happens in such a place: there are layers and layers and layers of business-to-business goods and services companies in large and advanced cities, selling their stuff to the big boys in that metro area. So if you want to know what the advanced places do, you have to look not to the low-end consumer stuff, but to the high-margin high-end capital side. On a national scale, that means that the most advanced economies make and export mostly capital goods, which are, after all, entirely business-to-business. See here: https://gradesfixer.com/blog/the-world-factbook-rankorder/, and scroll down to the commodity paragraph of the Exports section. What do you see? I quote: "agricultural products (soybeans, fruit, corn) 9.2%, industrial supplies (organic chemicals) 26.8%, capital goods (transistors, aircraft, motor vehicle parts, computers, telecommunications equipment) 49.0%, consumer goods (automobiles, medicines) 15.0%" Note that "industrial supplies" is also strictly business-to-business, so in toto approximately 75% of US exports are business-to-business. That's because most large US cities also have economies where the businesses mostly specialize in this, selling to the giants like GE, Boeing, Ford, or Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs???? Yes: financial companies are voracious consumers of technologically advanced products. It's been that way since Amsterdam was the leading global city, and probably even before that. Sooo, before you prematurely announce that China is once again the place around which the rest of the world revolves, remember, that prize goes to the place that dictates the level of business, not consumer, technology. Consumer technology is a dead end, as Japan has discovered to its everlasting sorrow; it's the real reason they are now, and will be for the foreseeable future, in a deflationary spiral. Capital always has been, and always will be, where the real money is.