Naked Capitalism has the article The Chronic Exporters’ Curse? by Yves Smith.

The article covers a number of facets of the issue.  She starts with a discussion of why the oligarchs don’t want the government to solve the unemployment problem.

Michal Kalecki made this point in his seminal essay, “Political Aspects of Full Employment” in 1943:

The reasons for the opposition of the ‘industrial leaders’ to full employment achieved by government spending may be subdivided into three categories: (i) dislike of government interference in the problem of employment as such; (ii) dislike of the direction of government spending (public investment and subsidizing consumption); (iii) dislike of the social and political changes resulting from the maintenance of full employment.

Yves Smith goes on to a discussion of some of the problems with being a chronic exporter.

One of the issues with being a chronic exporter is that you are effectively funding your sales. You wind up exporting capital. You sell your goods to them and take their currency in return. Now of course, you could just sell those dollars or euros or pesos and convert it into your currency, but that is pretty much never done on a large scale, since selling those currencies will drive the home currency price up relative to them, undermining your position as exporter. Now the exporter can simply hold those foreign currency payments as cash, but that is seen as unimaginative, so most recipients at least put it into something with more yield (government bills or bonds) or more speculative assets (stocks, real estate, re-investment in the country in question).

She goes on to relate her experiences advising Japanese entities on mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. during the ascendancy of the Japanese economy. The foreign investor is usually an easy mark for the banks and local investors. I have often thought about the idea of lifting investment restrictions on Chinese companies putting their country’s excess U.S. reserves to use. We could manage to cheat them just the way we did to Japanese investors.

I have thought that eventually the Chinese could stop depending on exports to create full employment when they transitioned to using their domestic market demand to maintain full employment. Yves Smith explains the problem with that idea.

… no country in modern times has made a crisis-free transition from being export-driven to having a large domestic consumer base. Development economists, late to recognize this issue, now recommend a more balanced growth model that places less emphasis on exports and more on building internal markets. But the current export champions seem unwilling or unable to abandon their past successful formula, even when it’s not working as well for them as it once did.

The one danger we face in trying to take advantage of knowing that a situation cannot go on forever, is that we don’t know exactly how that bad situation will end.  If we bet on the wrong mode of change, we could end up making a losing bet. Diversification would seem like a prudent course of action.