the Chinese are really good at low cost manufacturing
They’re not “good” at it, they just have no minimum wage and no semblance of annoying things like worker protections or unions to be concerned with.
China doesn’t have a national minimum wage, but minimum wage is delegated to the local level there and definitely exists in every single province. Just echoing what the other user said, literally everything you said here is easily disprovable. https://www.china-briefing.com/news/minimum-wages-China/
Beijing has the highest hourly minimum wage (RMB 26.4/US$3.7 per hour)
Glad you learned something!
like worker protections or unions
That’s just patently false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-China_Federation_of_Trade_Unions
It is the largest trade union in the world with 302 million members in 1,713,000 primary trade union organizations.
Like all things in China, this is owned by the government, making it pointless.
They actually have a problem with workers or the lack of them and they have invested heavily in robotics. They aren’t the China of the 70s and 90s. It’s really something that we need to face up to if we want to compete but our political class isn’t really ready for that sort of reality. Years behind because of smugness.
We can’t compete with a country that pays their workers $1/hr without doing the same.
