It's a combination of more freedom and relentlessly stealing the IP of already successful nations, building the same thing for much cheaper, and putting them out of business.<p>When your biggest resource is people, it's much cheaper and more effective to just take something that someone else has poured billions of dollars into for R&D than to build it yourself.<p>The steel industry is a good example of this.
Maybe that "AJR" trio of academics should have added a historian? Because anyone who thinks China is unique in being a big economic success story is profoundly ignorant of history.