China has a huge unemployment problem and heavily restricts internal migration. The hukou /internal passport system sends unauthorized immigrants from the countryside into an "illegal alien" system. Without the right passes, your kids don't get into school, you can't rent a home etc. If you look at country-sized subregions of China (e.g. Shanghai region, guanghzou) the economics and dynamics parallel those of the USA.

And china is a WTO member; if you look at it honestly, its trade is not more restricted than the US. Yes, it does try to make its own special standards, but they are similar to what the US does (e.g. with automative regulations or electronics regulations) -- it's simply that the US is a far more valuable market so people are more willing to jump through the necessary hoops).

Yes the US is even more open, but part of that is via agreements (like the now dead TPP) that were specifically intended to give preference to countries that were not China.

As for "flourishing"...let's just say that most of the poorest quintile in the US are wealthier and healthier than most of the richest quintile in China. Any absolute growth from a small number is a relatively large percentage.

Note: I am very much opposed to Chinese policies in many areas including the ones described above. But I can form that opinion without cliches like you hear from politicians).

I don't know if you've visited a place like Hong Kong, but the short answer is this :

Those cities are full of immigrants, taking up the badly paid shit jobs. They're all Chinese immigrating into China so "it's not immigration", but only in the same way Polish workers in the UK are "not immigrants" (not meant pejoratively, and frankly I admire what those people in the UK do, they deserve to be treated better than the British treat them. On the other hand, I do understand why the British labour class doesn't like them : they depress wages, conditions, and opportunity).

China is a country of 1 billion people. A slight minority, let's say 400 million people, live in the countryside (ie. everywhere except for some 30 dots on the map). Not in abject poverty (certainly not compared to 20 years ago), but certainly making a LOT less money than they do in cities and living in nicer natural environments, but worse conditions. So they migrate to the cities, take total shit jobs, and slowly become part of the Chinese cities.

This process has started, but is far from finishing (although I do think it's more than halfway through, but it's got another decade or so before it fizzles out)

So TLDR: China is not doing this without immigration at all. It's just that it doesn't really look like immigration for the same reason that the pretty sizable migration out of Chicago doesn't really look like immigration.

>How is it that China flourishes without immigrants and with restricted trade?

China has a lot of immigrants. Mostly from rural areas to urban areas. They are Chinese, sure, but because the different laws governing rural areas vs. cities they might as well be from another country. These cities (Shenzen, Hong Kong, Shanghai...) work with special trade regulations that are comparable to any other free-market countries around the world.

For China, replace immigration with movement of people from rural to urban. It's a big country and they've been undergoing dramatic population shifts. We don't have that luxury in the west. Also define flourishing economy. They are hurting pretty badly as well.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chinas-economic-problems-wi...

Yeah, that sentence stood out to me too. Kind of like starting a philosophical debate with the statement "Obviously God exists, so I will now proceed with the other parts of my argument". Definitely not as axiomatic as the author assumes.

And even if our current economy truly can't flourish without immigrants and trade, there's still a viable argument to be made that building an economy on immigrants and trade was a bad idea and we should try to undo some of that.

Define flourishes. Being poor in China is 10x worse than being poor in the West.

Because it has a massive population surplus of people who have not entered the industrialized urban centers where modern economies need talent and where the non-barely above poverty jobs are for the Chinese. For countries without surplus rural workers making barely above poverty, immigration is required, especially when we need skillsets that aren't growing domestically as fast as we need to fill open positions.

China has 380m people making about $4-$10 a day in rural areas dying to migrate to better living conditions. That's more workers in rural areas than the US has people in total: men, women, children, students, retired, etc. These situations aren't comparable.

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2016/09/16/china_is_s...

As of 2014, over half of China’s roughly 770 million employed workers were urban workers. The problem is that the other half – almost 380 million people – are employed in rural areas. The urban households aren’t exactly raking it in, but the rural households have not progressed far enough beyond the World Bank’s arbitrary $3.10 to say they have escaped much of anything, and certainly not poverty.

They have a large domestic population of people willing (~needing) to perform work despite scant worker protections, forming continuous domestic rural-to-urban migration; they have plentiful extractable raw materials and aren't particularly concerned about the environment; they are able and willing to take on government debt partly because internationally their combined their military and economic might doesn't make it very likely that anyone will bother to collect.

The problem is as China's acquiring a "middle-class" that begins to resemble its American counterpart in the 1950s, the pool of people in China who will do just about any job is decreasing. Middle-class people use their increased economic security to develop a sense of vested agency and are less likely to voluntarily let their living and working standards dip. Therefore, the most exploitative production is moving out of the Chinese mainstream and into the rural fringes of its own society, or elsewhere altogether.

China is a developing country. Policies that work well for them generally won't translate to a fully-developed economy.

Primarily, their growth (in terms of the Cobb-Douglass equation) comes from increasing technology (the "A" in the equation) by adopting already-created technologies.

If you're at the frontiers of technology, you can't just implement pre-existing technology. You need policies that will help you invent new ones.

Growth is not a function of immigration, but of population size. Immigration itself is just a means to get more people. It also increases diversity, which is like bringing in new people in into a company, which is always stirs things up... in a good way, most of the time.

The New York Times wants mass immigration into the Western world and if the subject is culture, they say, "You need immigration for great culture." If the subject is cuisine, they say, "You need immigration for great cuisine." Everything from economics, art, science, "Freedom [TM]", "The American Dream [TM]", down to clean toilets, harvested vegetables, blown leaves, etc, etc, etc, all have one necessary ingredient according to the elites: Mass immigration. You will find this to be 100 percent consistent across the media.

The rational person recognizes that, in fact, NONE of these things depend upon mass immigration. The elites aren't daft, and so they clearly want it for a separate, undisclosed, reason.

Or Japan. Despite low birth rates low immigration and a less open economy, rigid educational system, rigid new graduate hiring system, it's still the no. 3 economy in the world.

> China flourishes Yea, lets be more like China, the leader in "quality of life" metric. /s