&gt; You don&#x27;t need global consumer brands when your country is the size of China.<p>Need? I guess not. But I think the point is that those things manifest themselves in a healthy market&#x2F;economy&#x2F;society, a healthy <i>innovative</i> market. If you&#x27;re not advancing technologically, then you have no hope for your future. And that&#x27;s what companies like Samsung, Toshiba, and Sony all do (in the electronics industry). They innovate. That innovation breeds more innovation and lays the groundwork&#x2F;framework for future innovation.<p>That&#x27;s China&#x27;s biggest problem right now; they relied so much on theft of IP that they lack the infrastructure to innovate on their own. They&#x27;re stuck on a ledge and can&#x27;t go any higher without either technological handouts or stealing more IPs. Unfortunately for China, companies are becoming much better at protecting themselves having learned from past mistakes.<p>China is essentially the world&#x27;s factory. That&#x27;s all, nothing more, nothing less. That&#x27;s all they will ever be until they climb down from their ledge and start climbing up again (starting over from scratch).<p>&gt; They have 15% of the world&#x27;s population<p>And? not sure how this is relevant. If anything, it&#x27;s even more incriminating; they have that many people but so little to show for it. So little genius, so little innovation, so little advancement... It&#x27;s proof that their current social, economic and political system has been a failure. They should be trouncing everyone. But they aren&#x27;t.<p>&gt; Corruption is being cleaned up<p>Their &quot;corruption clean-up&quot; has been just lip service. You&#x27;ll note it was published first from China&#x27;s own government-ran news agencies (Xinhua).<p>If you look at transparency international&#x27;s corruption index (here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transparency.org&#x2F;cpi2014&#x2F;results" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transparency.org&#x2F;cpi2014&#x2F;results</a>) you&#x27;ll see that they actually dropped 20 places from 2013 to 2014. Their corruption actually <i>got worse</i>, not better.<p>&gt; we&#x27;ve never seen what happens when a large country &quot;awakens&quot; in the age of globalization.<p>Unfortunately, China&#x27;s a long way from awakening.