So yes, sure, China will make business if they can, but they are not "out there to get you".
it just so happens that it's always very profitable to sell opium.
At the time I thought it was a bit exaggerated.
This is jingoistic at best. Let's ignore that "goodness at business" is an ambiguous and multidimensional metric. Or that defining a "better" direction is similarly dubious. The argument is simply "anything you can do I can do better." To that, the counterfactual is Ricardian comparative advantage.
More broadly, every culture says such things in times of growth and decline. It is never true. But a changing baseline combined with localisation bias reproduces it often. It is a case where the utterance of a thing is more meaningful than the thing itself.
But realize that cities like Guangzhou (pop. 25 M) have been trading hubs for much longer than the USA has existed. And some families have had a continuous line of business for centuries. The business culture is very strong there.
This is something, I never saw in the US.
For example?