China: economic colony?

Is China a paper tiger? Hugo Restall, editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal, makes the compelling case that far from being an economic threat, China's economy is complimentary to the US. And, in fact...

You might even say that China is an economic colony of the U.S., with its currency so tightly pegged to the dollar and American companies using it as a base for their low-cost manufacturing.

That might seem like a strange idea given how nationalistic the Beijing regime is. But consider the government's actual behavior, and it's not hard to imagine that if Paul Bremer were running China instead of Hu Jintao, he'd be accused of exploiting the country's economy to benefit the U.S. and other Western countries. ...

... China is using the hard-earned savings of its people, which could have been devoted to building globally competitive companies, and is instead throwing them down 100,000 state-owned ratholes so that Chinese workers can produce artificially cheap products for American consumers to enjoy. The government is even taking away the dollars earned by selling these products and loaning them back to the U.S. at low rates so that those American consumers can keep on buying.