By 1900, I think it's fair to say that the United States is the most productive
society in the world, both in terms of industrial goods and in terms of farm
products. American industrial exports to China alone had gone up four times
between 1895 and 1900. There was one cotton textile plant in Alabama, a huge
plant, 25,000 spindles. The entire product of this Cordova, Alabama textile
plant, the entire product went to China. It was totally dependent on the China
market. When the United States was considering what to do in China in
1899-1900, as the Chinese Revolution was beginning to appear, there was one
South Carolina, politician who wrote Secretary of State John Hay and said,
"You must understand that to these people," by whom he meant the textile
manufacturers, the China market is everything. So China became this savior of
American over productivity in the 1890s. We looked at China to save us, to be
the market for this tremendous productivity that Americans were enjoying in the
late 1890s.
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