In fairness, the tacit Sino-American currency union has propped up Chinese industry since the Nixon Era. Predicting that the U.S. would eventually fatigue of this arrangement wasn't totally insane. Those folks just didn't appreciate that the U.S. and China were going to keep trucking along until China's population was well and truly urbanized. China just cracked the 50% urbanization ratio in the last couple of years, so who knows if the government there will remain motivated to drag peasants into the cities, or not.