Fast changing economic realities

Li Ka-shing
Wikipedia Yesterday I stumbled by accident into a documentary on China's economic development by a Dutch TV-station, the VPRO, who has a name for good-quality TV, at least that was the idea before I dropped out of TV-watching a long time ago.
Because of the subject I decided to stay on and got upset as the item moved on, for all the wrong reasons I discovered at the end of the hour-long session. The documentary was originally made in 2005 and that explained why some of the interviews referred to 2004 as the year of recording.
The theme was China's international expansion and if it proved one thing, it was how outdated a documentary can get in only a few years time.
An MBA-professor explained that China was the country of the ongoing cheap labor. A mistake that has proven to be wrong over the past few years. It still mentioned a Rotterdam port project, owned by Li Ka-shing's Hutchinson, as an example of China's expansion. A claim you can only make if you have no clue about Hong Kong's position in Asia.
Another example was the European partner of TCL and of course Haier was there as the eternal example of China's international expansion. Now we know that TCL's international adventure ended in a painful divorce and Haier has silently disappeared from the list of international successes, at least from the optimistic view of four years ago.
You had to be pretty alert and most of the few Dutch viewers of this documentary might not have noticed that the picture they got was very much outdated.