China also has moved away from its original status of purely producing basic, what you call, consumer commodities and Chinese companies are moving beyond China to various parts of the world.
I had the good fortune to be thrown unexpectedly into something called the Labour Research Unit - a little known organisation set up to assist the fledgling labour movement. It was not a company, nor a statutory board, nor a government department - in fact it did not exist at all as a legal entity. Thus in slightly unorthodox circumstances I became part of that struggle.