The 20th century was American companies offshoring manufacturing there to cut costs. If the tech and schematics weren't directly and willingly transferred to the Chinese, they copied them without permission.
Either way, corporate America's pursuit of short-term profits doomed us all as it always does.
The same thing has been happening with brown imported labor with Mexicans/etc for manual labor and now jeets are being imported to ensure corporate profits remain high. It's the Republican stance to consider this a good thing, by the way.