askchapo

Secondly, if it was, indeed, education that was at fault, what would you change, then?

Oust the liberals from academia and also prevent the dumbass spiral towards liberalization caused by Khrushchev's bloc's reforms and the tacit acceptance of the "second economy" that the post-Stalin USSR had. Without all those conditions he'd just be some guy.

I wouldn't be so sure, considering that there was the whole rest of the colonial world to exploit. It would just be more dispersed, I'd wager.

China was unique in that it had a massive well-educated population and at least some infrastructure ready to go, while primarily lacking industrial capital. It was basically the conditions of post-war Japan on a much larger scale, and the incorporation of Japan into the US economy as a colonized industrial base was basically the same phenomenon decades earlier: a way to increase the US's overall material wealth in consumer goods without the cost of scaling up production domestically.

The opening of China as a market had an even bigger effect and came at an even more opportune time, however, because it happened right as American industrial capital was aging and needed to be replaced anyways, and as a lot of local labor pools were almost fully utilized. That is, American industry was running up against material barriers to further expansion and was coming up on costly replacements and upgrades, and China solved both of those: with a huge pool of educated workers, lots of room for new development, and an eagerness to buy fresh industrial capital, it became possible for American industrial companies to get larger factories with more workers than they could have had in the US for the same cost as upgrading their existing factories, or to shift some of their production entirely to Chinese companies and just serve as middlemen.

In short, they got a cheaper investment that cut their ongoing costs and increased their supply, enabling rapid growth and letting them avoid the wall of full-exploitation that they'd run up against. There really wasn't any other place that could offer the same benefits at the same scale as China.

And without the recovery of the US and the seeming wealth in consumer goods that outsourcing to China enabled, a generation of Soviet students don't get the dumbest brainworms ever by mistaking American colonial plunder for some sort of secret magic efficiency of markets.