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Australia seems to be going towards the same direction as the US.

So, Australia is going towards having the second biggest manufacturing output in the world, or at least the 4th biggest on a per capita basis? Because that's where the US is. Granted, the percentage of the US's economy that is in manufacturing has gone down over the years, but that is probably to be expected in a mature economy. China has overtaken the number one spot on overall output, but the US is a solid second in output per country and China is not even close on a per capita basis.
Some old numbers

https://www.mapi.net/blog/2014...
Bullshit meme is bullshit.
Thanks for playing, though.
And what's worse, is that the US manufacturing output has an upward trend, minus recession dips. So you're worse than full of shit, you were never anywhere close to right.

China outgrew us, because 1357 > 318, and every marginal increase in per-capita production there accounts for a *fucking massive* increase in total output.
We didn't shift our manufacturing to them, they started industrializing.

We're producing less? I'm guessing no and that this is the effects of all that automation I keep hearing isn't happening...

Our manufacturing sector is growing, but slowly. It is far slower than most developing countries. Here is a decent article on manufacturing grown rates: https://www.mapi.net/china-has-dominant-share-world-manufacturing. That said, we are probably dropping in certain sectors, such as computer/electronics manufacturing. The U.S. is either outsourcing or automating a lot of the manufacturing jobs out of existence.

Not for a long time https://www.mapi.net/china-has...

No it doesn't, and hasn't for a few years now. https://www.mapi.net/china-has...

Sorry, that information has been overcome by events - as if anyone had any doubts it would be, given that it showed a virtual tie. I was waiting for someone to complacently fall for the trap.

China and the US changed places in 2010.

Look at the comparative graphs.

Doesn't lead to much complacency on the part of rational people in the US, and if you separate out the "defense" manufacturing, the gap is FAR wider.

Here is the authoritative statistical data.

>China's artificial (and illegal) manipulation of its currency. Care to elaborate?

Sure. I think this testimony to a Senate Committee should explain it well enough. Some key excerpts (make that some long-ass paragraphs):

Chinese exchange rate policy is an important special case which spells currency manipulation in a different way. The Chinese currency has a fixed rate to the dollar but is nonconvertible on capital account. Over the past year, there has been a $25 billion trade surplus, a $45 billion net inflow of foreign direct investment--which also puts upward market pressures on the exchange rate--and over $50 billion of central bank purchases of foreign exchange. In this case, the central bank purchases offset almost three-quarters of market-generated upward pressure on the yuan from the trade surplus and the FDI inflow combined. Moreover, these official foreign exchange purchases may have been even larger except for an unfolding financial scandal involving billions of dollars of missing reserves.

Based on the IMF definition, China has clearly been manipulating its currency for mercantilist purposes. The Bank of China has made protracted large scale purchases of foreign exchange--$150 billion since 1995--in order to maintain a large trade surplus as an offset to poor growth performance in the domestic economy. A direct measure of the manipulation is not possible because of the nonconvertible fixed exchange rate. There is no doubt, however, that if the central bank had not purchased $50 billion in 2001, there would have been strong upward pressures on the yuan in formal and informal markets. The bottom line is that the Chinese yuan is substantially undervalued and should certainly not be devalued as the Chinese government occasionally threatens to do.

The unique form of Chinese currency manipulation provides a mix of benefits and costs for China and for the United States. The most direct result is a larger trade surplus for China, which means more export-oriented jobs in the Chinese economy. From the U.S. point of view, of course, it means a larger trade deficit with China and the loss of export-oriented and import-competing jobs. In 2001, U.S. imports from China were $102 billion, or more than five times larger than the $19 billion of U.S. exports to China.
...
A similar conclusion can and should be drawn about China as an economic aid "graduate." There is no longer any justification for China to receive several billion dollars per year in long-term loans on favorable terms from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and some bilateral donors, when there are $220 billion of unutilized funds stashed away in the central bank. And yet the development banks continue to lend large sums to China!
...
Finally, and more speculatively, China at some future point could use its official dollar holdings as foreign policy leverage against the United States by threatening to sell large quantities of dollars on the market, or merely shift its reserves away from dollars and into euros and yen. This will not happen anytime soon because the result would be a decline in the dollar and an adverse impact on Chinese exports. At some future point, however, if China were to become less dependent on exports to the United States for economic growth, such a threat could become credible. For example, the threat of substantial Chinese sales of dollars, with its implications for a disruptive decline in the dollar and the U.S. stock market, especially during a downward phase in the U.S. economy and/or an election year, could influence the course of U.S. policy toward Taiwan. Chinese military officers, in fact, in their studies of nonconventional defense strategies, include reference to George Soros and his attack on the British pound in 1992 as a template for disrupting a rival's (i.e., the United States) economic system.