I remember it all, from from the Nixon/Kissinger ping-pong diplomacy days.
It was no secret. It was the whole point of the rapprochement. Everybody knew how it was going down, everybody was saying "Why didn't we think of this before?" We had a PLAN.

China was the great market, a bottomless pit of consumers ready to buy all the products we could ever hope to manufacture. We would get filthy rich selling them stuff; we could never saturate that endless sink of potential customers. And America got there first, we had a step up on the rest of the world. Even the Japanese (that's who we were really afraid of back then) would have to wait in line while we cleaned up.

Hey, I'm not knocking them. I fell for it too, I was all for it. I was rooting for Dick and Henry. We would jack up their standard of living selling them cars and appliances and we would get rich and have full employment forever. We'd even get fat off the interest by loaning them money so they could buy our manufactured goods.

Its funny how things worked out, isn't it? They wound up doing to us exactly what we were planning on doing to them.

All we ever sold them was the rope they used to hang us with.