The conclusion may be somewhat of a logical fallacy; distribution will be local to cheap materials and depend heavily on tax codes. Shipping the end product isn't a huge cost.

A main point in his argument was that they couldn't engineer robotics as well as the US due to poor education. I very sincerely doubt this. With the size of the Chinese population, we can afford to look at their top engineers and compare them to ours. Averages mean very little in this case.