Doug
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Don't know. But let me point out that there is difference between China as national power with its hierarchical elites and whatever internal systems of power that are exercised from Beijing, and Chinese labor doing the work.
China gains power, wealth and influence by subjugating its own masses, just as the US power elite do over people like me. (I am sounding more nasty these days because I am back with the exploited masses again.)
Joanna brought over a photography book the other night that makes the point better than any analysis. ``Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age'', Sebastiao Salgado, Aperature, 1995. Nice big format 10 x 13 black and white, 395 pages of photographs with almost no text.
Most of the photos were taken in the `developing' world. Auto factories, textiles, shipping, steel, agriculture, fishing, mining---Africa, India, China, Cuba, Brazil, oil fields in Iraq and Kuwait (from the first Gulf War), Ukraine, Sicily, Spain, France, Azerbaijan, Indonesia and the US (slaughter house). Some of the true grit places of the earth.
There's no doubt about what's going on. Tuna heads bigger than men, dead hogs moved by fork lifts, textile mills that count floor space by the acre, miles of shipping cranes like giant grasshoppers in fog, vast slaps of iron moved by hydraulic rams, cauldrons from hell, bicycle frames stacked to the ceiling,, a sea of bricks, worker's tea shops filled with smoke and tables---page after page of work on a vast scale.
The most famous of these photos is a series done in Serra Pelada in Brazil. An open pit mine teaming with laborers climbing down bare timber ladders hundreds of feet into this vast pit of tiers. It looks like something out of a Hollywood Bible movie of Egyptian slaves laboring for Pharaoh. Or a scene from Dante's Inferno.
CG