This is not as true as you think, and will be changing rapidly in the very near future. Read the book "China Inc." by Ted Fishman and prepare to be damn near terrified of the economic threat that China poses not only to the US but to the entire first world.

There isn't anything that any first world country can manufacture that China can't eventually manufacture better and cheaper. Every time we first-worlders marvel how inexpensively we can purchase just about anything now, its because the Chinese are driving the market and taking manufacturing jobs from the US, Canada, Europe, and just about every one else in the world. This trend will only continue.

China presently represents one of the greatest threats to the economy of the first world. As more manufacturing migrates there, the erosion of good paying jobs continues. The knowledge jobs are next, because China (and India) have gigantic and highly competitive university school systems and combine those training grounds with partnerships with all of the world's tech manufacturers, presently scrambling to set up research centres there. These two facts combine to give China an unhealthy control over both the development of products as well as the supply chains that connect to the first world. The Chinese are using the influx of foreign capital that comes iwth all of this to not only increase their competitiveness, but also to float the debt that much of the first world is currently accumulating. China holds a substantial percentage of US (and other foreign nation) government and private debt right now.

Give them 10 years and China will hold the US and other first world nations by the economic short and curiles. The one minor upside to this is that in order to look for work, illegal immigrants are going to have to find ways to get to China because many of jobs left here in North America will be the service/manual labour jobs that we presently don't want to do.