I think we are paying too much attention to the political opening of China and not enough to the economic factors affecting the US Dollar at the time. We are right to blame Nixon, not for opening up China, but for closing the doors to Fort Knox with the Nixon Shock in ending US-Dollar gold convertability. This resulted in high inflation and a devaluing of the dollar via a floating exchange rate. This made US exports cheap (easier to export), but for other countries assets in dollars fell in exchange-value, and their exports became more expensive (harder to export). This happened at the same time as the OPEC crisis, so Carter was facing a failing economy with extreme inflation. And by appointing Volcker who hiked interest rates to stop the inflation, caused a recession and a permanent deindustrialization of the US as well as dozens of countries with US assets going bankrupt. We ended up embracing a deficit economy powered by financialization, but since countries like China had didn't have dollar assets, didn't face austerity measures and structural adjustment programs from the IMF, and were industrialized, they could take up all the lost manufacturing that the US was willing to lose in order to maintain global hegemony in other ways.
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