Molson Hart

Afaik protectionism was only relevant in the development of certain industries in China, i.e. high technology. A middle class would've been created on the back of apparel, shoes, injection molding, electronics assembly alone.

Well yes if you have a huge labor price difference then you dont need to add anything on top of that. By definition protectionism only applies in cases where you are not competitive. I mean youre probably right to an extent but question is to what extent.

Is that true? Africa is not exporting much besides raw materials and their labor is cheap. I think you really do need infrastructure and a few other things in order to compensate for the disadvantage of sea shipping...in order to compete. All I'm saying is that it's possible that

protectionism was a bug, not a feature of the creation of their middle class. It probably would've happened anyway. It's unclear as to whether it was needed to compete in high tech. What areas are they doing that successfully? ZTE/phone tech? Protectionism not needed for that.

I don't think we can objectively settle this :) also they might not need it now but 10 20 30 years ago? How do you know they would not all use Nokia had they opened up completely before they had high tech?

Agreed. Fair point. Even the basic light industrial manufacturing I described all started with a foreign company coming to China, setting up a factory, and then using Chinese labor. The head engineer, the general manager, the head salesman, etc. would then go on to start his own.

Re: Nokia - because they were all using Nokia? There are enough legitimately innovative and quality Chinese companies out there who were not protected to believe that they could achieve this stuff on their own: Alibaba, DJI, Tencent to name a few.

No I just used it as an arbitrary example. I'm not trying to downplay their ingenuity and competence, it's not a question of being capable to innovate but rather the market to be fully capitalized from abroad before you get to that level.