Economic Daily: Industrial Competition Does Not Equal "Squeezing Development Space"

In recent years, discussions surrounding China's manufacturing industry have continued to heat up in the arena of international public opinion. The logic behind the claim that "China's industry is taking away other countries' share of the pie" is to view global manufacturing as a "pie" of limited size, suggesting that as China's manufacturing sector steadily advances toward the mid-to-high end while maintaining a massive scale of traditional manufacturing, it will squeeze the industrialization space of other developing countries. In May of this year, researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics published an article proposing the so-called "China squeeze," arguing that China's competitive advantages in manufacturing are making it difficult for some low- and middle-income countries to achieve industrialization through labor-intensive manufacturing. Such a judgment is obviously overly simplistic.