Having more apples doesn't make your existing apples less valuable.

having a surplus of apples means you value an individual apple less, yes

that's how the concept of "having things" works

As long as your demand is growing ALL your factories are just as valuable.

so if 20% of your factories are now somewhere else, whereas before it was 0%, then the share of value taken up by domestic factories has decreased, as has the share of demand they're managing to satisfy by domestic factories

if china completely stops building new factories at home, and in 30 years 90% of their factories are abroad, and 10% are at home, would you say their industrial base had been "hollowed out", even though the absolute number of factories at home is the same?

If you can't even understand what the article says then there's no point having further discussion.

i pointed out that there was no point discussing this further when you said that china was wrong about their own economy, but for some reason you insisted on it

It's not an economy where the market makes decisions where labor and resources are allocated. The government decides that and the market acts as an allocator within that context.

this is like saying "the government doesn't decide that; steve from the finance department decides that", or "the market doesn't decide that; a distributed network of private investors decides that"

if the government bases their decisions off the market, then the market is the one making those decisions, just like steve is making his decisions based on what he's been told to do from the government, and just like investors are making their decisions based on what they think the market is telling them to do

you can quibble about how the same market effects will produce different results, but the result is still a market economy

i'm genuinely so excited for your next fruit analogy that accidentally explains why you're wrong