Yes, and that is how you get a top-heavy k-shaped economy I believe. It is harder and harder to sell premium A+ products, because most people can only afford what works. If my old ice cream vendor charges me 25% more but puts chocolate sprinkles on it i'm going for the non-sprinkle version.
Only with some industries, mostly electronics and light manufacturing. The rest of the history of software products doesn't look like this at all. China cloned Amazon and Meta fairly well (but only within their local/captured markets) but not Microsoft or Google and absolutely not Apple. Entertainment and culture exports are still effectively zero (like, what, three blockbuster films?) where the US, Japan and Korea define pop across the globe. Heavy industry is mixed, with decent success in consumer vehicles now but little purchase in stuff like heavy equipment or shipbuilding.
Basically it's complicated, and not really a point well suited to that kind of generalism.
Americans order Chinese products from SHEIN and Aliexpress type websites.
So China did penetrate the US ecommerce market, but they are not taking on Amazon directly.
People are buying from the Chinese and reselling on Amazon, which has a good logistics network that Chinese companies can't possibly build in the USA.
> absolutely not Apple
You need to look up Oneplus to see how many people were using their devices till they announced exit from Western markets.
The Chinese Android phones are essentially replacement for a big chunk of Apple ecosystem.
If these cheap mobile devices didn't exist - Apple could possibly be selling many more devices.
> China cloned .... Meta fairly well
TikTok is giving Meta a run for their money in USA.
They had to be restricted via threat of regulation to offload stake in TikTok USA.
> Microsoft
They didn't compete with Microsoft directly as entering Western Enterprise market is hard for the Chinese. Even Google can't beat Microsoft there till now.
The final part of this sentence shows why there is absolutely no need to look up Oneplus.
I'm not sure if you are from the US, but if you are, it really gives you a distorted image of what the worldwide smarphone market is like.
E.g. in many European countries, it is 1/3 iPhone, 1/3 Samsung, 1/3 others (which are mostly Chinese brands).
TikTok competes with Meta, not Olivia Rodrigo or BTS.
And this is really sad, because they have thousands of years of cultural heritage and also plenty of great films. Somehow, they've failed at exporting this completely.
Uhh, China does over half of the world’s shipbuilding.
China is also responsible for 25% [1] of the world’s heavy equipment manufacturing and is considered to have double[2] the CAGR of the global average for heavy equipment manufacturing.
0: https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...
1: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/constructi...
2: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/heavy-co...
They even got the car Apple always wanted, but never managed to build.