"China is not merely climbing the technological ladder; it is pulling up the ladder behind it." [pulling up the ladder]
This phrase directly names the structural mechanism: a rising power retaining dominance across all manufacturing tiers simultaneously, blocking the sequential handoff that historically enabled poorer countries to industrialize.
Reasoning from this article
The article quantifies this dynamic with $355 billion in excess value-added exports and documents that China's manufacturing wage advantage has disappeared yet its export share persists, suggesting policy distortion rather than pure productivity. The historical comparison — advanced economies at China's income level held ~8% global export share vs. China's current 27% — establishes that this is structurally anomalous, not a natural feature of development. The mechanism generalizes: any sufficiently large economy that combines industrial policy, currency management, and deep supply chain integration could replicate this ladder-pulling dynamic, making it a template risk for future rising powers.