Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

This is a good article. Fortunately, this relationship looks likely to continue for the time being, and it is the reason the present economic problems haven't turned into an all out catastrophy... The Chinese are literally bailing out our banks.

The $1.4 Trillion Question