Why has China grown so fast? One very important reason is that it timed its economic opening to the world exceptionally well. The three decades following China’s 1978 “reform and opening” coincided with a massive surge in China’s working-age population, which peaked at more than one billion in 2013—more than three times the size of the entire U.S. at the time. Connecting that gargantuan pool of youthful strivers to global supply chains not only enabled Chinese factories to undercut other low-value-added manufacturers world-wide...

Source: Wall Street Journal May 21, 2019 09:33 UTC