It may look as though China is getting the big payoff, but over all, the biggest winners are consumers in the United States and other rich countries, who have benefited enormously from China's production of cheaper toys, clothing, electronics and other goods.

At the same time, U.S. multinationalsand other foreign companies, including retailers, are big winners, because they are the largely invisible hands behind the factories pumping out inexpensive goods from China. And they are reaping the bulk of the profit from the trade.

"Basically, in the 1990s, foreign firms based in America, Europe, Japan and the rest of Asia moved their manufacturing operations to China," said Yasheng Huang, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But the controls and therefore profits of these operations firmly rest with foreign firms. While China gets the wage benefits of globalization, it does not get to keep the profits of globalization."

To the extent that there are any real losers, they are mostly lower-wage workers elsewhere, like the ones at Hitachi, who lost their jobs in Japan, along with workers in other parts of Asia and in the United States who suffered as employers began relocating factories to China. Indeed, despite the big shift to China, U.S. imports from Asia as a whole have hardly changed in the last 15 years.

Factories in Taiwan used to assemble the world's computers; now China does. Hong Kong garment workers used to stitch tons of fabric into finished clothing; now Chinese workers do. And Japanese plants once manufactured the world's most popular consumer electronics brands, like Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba; now many of them are shipped from Chinese ports.