A brief history on how wealth was transferred from east to west in the 18th century. China dominated silver imports. The market value of silver in the Ming territory was double its value elsewhere, which provided great arbitrage profit for the Europeans and Japanese. While the Chinese imported silver, they exported gold. Silver later became used as coinage. Local Chinese government officials would demand taxes to be paid in silver and eventually silver backed all of China's economy. The increasing supply of silver from the Spanish and other Europeans caused the price of silver to inflate, which eventually affected the deflation of values of all commodities. Because the Chinese economy was based on silver, this soon led to the collapse of the Ming dynasty.
Europeans reduced the proportion of silver used to pay for goods from China and as a result, China had less of it to use. They printed more paper money even though they didn't have the silver or any other physical commodity to back its value. Eventually, this paper money became worthless and untrustworthy which eventually led to the Opium Wars. (1)
From this we can see that the west USA and Europe are doing exactly what the Chinese did during it's down fall, ie export gold and the exponential printing of paper money in the form of Quantitative easing (QE)
The amount of gold being imported into China has been well reported, but it's not just China that is seeing an inflow of gold. Worldwide customers are choosing to store their precious metals in eastern based vaults says Head of Dealing at GoldMoney, Roland Khounlivong: 'We are seeing a gradual sell-off in the traditional western vaults, particularly Switzerland and the UK, and a move to store gold bullion and silver in Singapore. (2)
The transference of wealth in the cryptocurrency is clearly illustrated with the fiasco with LiteCoin SegWit activation. most people in the west will sell their bitcoins at some point whilst people in the east are hoarding them. I believe there will come a time when westerners will not be able to afford bitcoins.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_16th_to_18th_centuries
2 https://wealth.goldmoney.com/who-we-are/news/further-evidence-of-west-to-east-bullion-flow