This is propaganda, but there is truth to these situations.
My uncle used to work for a Korean export company in the 80s and 90s and when I asked him about discrimination back then, he said it wasn't so much ethnic discrimination as much as socioeconomic discrimination. China was growing, but still subpar in products standards and reputation.
Brands he'd see at the expos were sometimes just startups with small factories. But while their products weren't as good, their prices were great, because you could always bully them and haggle down the prices. Small Chinese companies were desperate. So a lot of American, EU, and Korean businesses had more financial backing and would simply just purchase the brands or find ways to open their own factories, which we can now see to be the case with all the outsourcing brands like Nike, Louis Vuitton, Apple, etc.
Author probably grew up around those times