Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Of course, for a long time, China's been able to compete and really gain this reputation of being the manufacturing factory of the world based on lower costs, particularly lower labor costs. But there have been some recent changes. Their cost edge is actually eroding. Their labor costs are actually going up, in part due to the price of their currency. They have some new environmental regulations. I think the Chinese are taking seriously some environmental issues. So the Chinese cost advantage has shrunk from double digits to single digits for many products. Distance is also increasingly becoming an issue. It takes about 45 days on average to ship a product from China, for example, to the United States. But now companies in the U.S., retailers, want to keep inventories low, which means they want fast access to suppliers when they do have a sale. So that also puts China at a disadvantage. And the bottom line here is we don't always want to take what's happened in the past - a situation in the past - and say that's always going to happen in the future. The economic world can certainly change on a dime."