It's such a common phase of growth that it is surprising people are surprised at China following along.
What I am surprised by is how long the US ignored the threat of moving production and knowledge to China, under the dogma of free trade.
What does surprise me is that nations and industries keep doing it expecting "this time is different". Despite the regularity across history of first supplying the tools and training - whether shipbuilding, looms, steel making or iPhone assembly and chip fab, then claim they'll never be able to design as well, and can only copy. Sometime later another industry sails inevitably off to some far flung region.
Since free trade almost nothing is considered strategic like the Chinese and others once thought tea, rubber, spices or early inventions that were guarded most carefully. Neither seems quite the right balance. :)
> opium wars
Palmerston's opium war, kicked off by an out-of-control East India Company giving themselves an opium monopoly, and the Tory party loosely falling into step. One of the two wars had parliament winning a vote against the government for entering an illegal war. Difficult to understand the thinking of the era yet at the same time feels strangely familiar.
Course the French, US and others joined in, and the US was marketing cheaper Turkish opium. Roosevelt or Hoover had an opium smuggling ancestor, I forget which of the two.
It was very much a cultural assumption that doing something like that 'just wasn't cricket' and no true Englishman would offshore their company!...
wiki: The only use of "invisible hand" found in The Wealth of Nations is in Book IV, Chapter II, "Of Restraints upon the Importation from foreign Countries of such Goods as can be produced at Home."