In spite of the polar positions of the United States and China in the global system, during the past dozen years their economies have become intertwined to such a degree that one is tempted to speak of an emerging new giant macroeconomic entity with a common metabolism — at least with regard to some of the more important modern industrial sectors like carmaking or electronics.
Integration or "twinning" of the two economies includes as its major process relocation of a considerable part of the U.S. automobile industry to China. This has contributed to almost overwhelming outsourcing practices that have become typical for this multilayered industrial sector of truly global dimensions.
It was conventional economic integration, in its regional form, that helped North American carmaking survive the first surge of global competition in the 1960s when the U.S. market had been challenged by European and Japanese companies.