When future historians chronicle the period after the Cold War, the rise of China will dominate their accounts. Beginning in the 2000s, China unleashed a flood of state-sponsored manufactures, many of them produced by western multinational corporations using Chinese labor on Chinese soil. This impoverished much of the already pressured industrial working class in the US and Europe, triggering populist revolts in rustbelts like the American Midwest, the north of England and eastern Germany.