China is a greedy and inhuman country, the latest pandemic also came from China from Wuhan and they really made a lot of bad things, food or all chemical products. cause cancer, greed has not stopped there for many centuries, they always want to be global hegemony, aggressive with European countries, silently poisoning young generations of Asian countries, food also like their ideology. I always thought the CCP was no different from the old Nazis, I didn't like them.
Three decades ago, China was a poor and overpopulated country, with one-fourth of the population living in extreme poverty. The economic situation was similar to the neighboring nations such India and Myanmar. But starting from the early 90s, the Chinese government was able to increase the wealth level of its population, by establishing new manufacturing units with the help from western investors. It was a mutually beneficial decision. Western investors profited in terms of lower labour costs and relaxed regulations and the Chinese workers benefited from higher salaries. Obviously there were negatives as well. As you mentioned, many of these manufacturing units produce huge amounts of toxins and pollutants. The neighboring nations such as India followed the same policy, but with a lag of two decades. Now it is going to take them 20-25 years, to reach the same level of prosperity that the Chinese enjoy.
Everything is said correctly, but we need to add a little more.
It was the attempt to develop a purely Chinese industry that gave rise to a market for low-quality, unsafe goods. They focused on their own and neighboring markets, including, for example, the countries of the former USSR. And such production remains today. Some of these factories are really forced to "rebuild", because the requirements of the EU and CA markets are quite tough, and it is very difficult to push totally toxic goods there.
The second part of the production, mainly high-tech, was brought by Western countries. They trained the staff, supplied all the equipment. Technology came to China. And then there was a technological breakthrough, which probably no one expected. True, then China began to cheat, and in every possible way to create conditions for the "nationalization" of what was brought by Western companies. And most importantly, I began to massively steal available technologies, I remember this process since 2003, when Huawei and 3COM were responsible to Cisco for the VRP operating system and documentation for the Quidway router, all this was primitively stolen ... And apparently the process only intensified ...
But, be that as it may - now China is a real world player with the strongest regional and global influence.