Amazon opens a store on Alibaba

Thanks for the tips. I may make it a tiny part of my daily language practice (I spend about 30-60 minutes a day on Spanish right now, and find that consistency is the most important thing), and maybe in a year or two "starting" Mandarin seriously will seem like starting Spanish or French to me now.

However, I think you're overly optimistic about some elements of the US economy. Oil? Much of our oil surplus is in tar sands/shale oil, which is the most expensive oil in existence to extract, and it only became profitable to extract during a brief window when the price of oil climbed into the stratosphere. Now that the OPEC nations have flooded the market, several of those oil producers have had to shut down their fracking operations (which is a blessing for the rest of us, given the ecological disaster that fracking represents), or are facing the possibility of economic disaster...huge sums have been invested in something that can only pay off if oil prices quadruple in the near future. Energy in the US is in an extremely precarious position, and there seems to be little motivation to correct course toward renewable sources.

China, on the other hand, while still mired in a fossil-fuel based economy like most of the rest of the world, and suffering extreme pollution in many of its large cities, has invested heavily in renewable energy, and Chinese manufacturers produce 63% of the world's photovoltaic cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China

I don't know enough to discuss the issue of debt (though the US is not exactly debt free, both on a national level and an individual level; our student loan problem is pretty much guaranteed to destroy an entire generation of wealth, and almost no one is talking about it). And, I agree with you that China is not a nice place to live or work for most of its people. I'm certainly not suggesting I'd rather live in China than the US.

"Bottom line, the US is in vastly better shape than China."

Today. We're certainly agreed on that. I don't know that I believe today is a strong predictor of ten, twenty, and fifty years from now. While it's true that national debt is dangerous and China is in many ways a backward nation, it's also true that China is home to many of the world's best technologists...we don't know their names, we don't know their work on an individual level. But, they're helping design the computers, phones, etc. that we're using, and they're writing much of the software for them.

The history of Silicon Valley has shown that a handful of very bright people with a lot of resources can change the world. China has a lot more than a handful of bright people and the manufacturing sector has vast resources. I believe we're only beginning to see what they can do.

"Simultaneously we're entering the era of robotics, which will wipe out tens of millions of low quality manual labor jobs in China."

This is an interesting discussion to have, particularly in the comparison of the US to China. Low cost manual labor left the United States to go to China beginning roughly around the time I was a kid. The US suffered through stagflation, and a variety of ups and downs, and some would argue the US is still recovering from loss of those jobs (real wage growth at the low end of the market has almost been flat for decades). If the US is healthy now, it is because it recovered from loss of those low-skill manufacturing jobs. It is US exceptionalism to assume that China cannot recover from the loss of those jobs. It may take decades (and that'll suck for Chinese people, because things are already pretty sucky for the poor in China), but it doesn't negate my argument that China has a hand in building nearly every element of our future.

In short, I think we're kinda coming at this from different angles. I'm not really arguing against most of what you say; and in fact, I completely agree with most of it. But, I think my point was maybe missed: I'm not saying China is a better place to live than the US. Merely that it's importance in the world economy going forward is almost impossible to overestimate.

Also, the US is failing to deliver STEM field graduates at the rate needed to grow our knowledge-based economy. This is a different discussion to have, but the anti-science, anti-reason, sentiment among our governing elite virtually guarantees long-term decline into stagnation.

Isn't that obvious? Foreign companies are limited or just entirely prevented from doing business in China. China is basically a closed market: you can maybe play if you follow some strict rules your competitors can ignore, but rule #1 is that a foreign company can't in any way lead.

Look at the countries around China and things are quite different. Chinese internet companies in general do very poorly outside of China, even in adjacent countries or even open Chinese territories.

A third possibility is that these foreign companies were not able to gain early traction in mainland China, due to government policies (the Great Firewall) and/or the company finding it hard to navigate the Chinese bureaucracy. Perhaps the companies at that earlier point in time (late '90s/early '00s) simply did not pay enough attention to the Chinese market and focused on expanding in the more developed parts of Asia with better Internet bandwidth and speeds, leaving room for native Chinese companies to grow and reap the first mover's advantage.