At a dinner party yesterday I listened to a fellow guest describe his seven week visit to China. As an academic he had connections with local former students: he traveled widely in the provincial areas. He kept referring to economic growth in areas we would consider similar to Mississippi as mindboggling. Other tidbits: Cell phones everywhere are changing society. He described an electric bus experiment where the vehicle is recharged on route at passenger stops. He told us that when a friend picked up a dinner tab with a charge card, the phone rang a couple of minutes later; it was the bank confirming the validity of the charge.
But the item that stood out was in regard to the area in which factories that feed Walmart are located. Some factories are being phased out because Walmart is now using cheaper labor in Vietnam. That makes Vietnam, China's "China".