http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/1
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A common objection to the account we have so far provided would be to point to China as an obvious exception to this picture of global stagnation, particularly in so far as it relates to otherwise global trends of deindustrialisation and under-employment. Of course, over these years China became a global industrial powerhouse, but it did so not through opening new markets or innovating new productive techniques, but rather by massively building out its manufacturing capacity at the expense of other countries.41 Everyone assumes that this expansion must have brought about a historic increase in the size of the Chinese industrial working class, but that is flatly false. The latest statistics show that, on balance, China did not create any new jobs in manufacturing between 1993 and 2006, with the total number of such workers hovering around 110 million people.42 This is not as surprising as it must seem at first glance, for two reasons.
First, over the last thirty years, the industrialization of the new southern industries — based initially on the processing of exports from Hong Kong and Taiwan — has kept pace with the gutting of the old, Maoist industrial northeast. That may provide part of the explanation of why China, unlike Germany, Japan, or Korea (earlier in the postwar period), saw almost no rise in real wages over decades of miracle growth rates.
Second, China has not only grown on the basis of labour-intensive manufacturing. Its low wages have helped it to compete across a spectrum of industries, from textiles and toys to cars and computers. The incorporation of existing labour-saving innovations into the firms of developing countries, including China, has meant that, even with growing geographic expansion, each set of industrialising countries has achieved lower heights of industrial employment (relative to total labour force). That is to say, not only has China lost manufacturing jobs in its older industries; the new industries have absorbed tendentially less labour relative to the growth of output.
In the 19th century when England was the workshop of the world, 95 percent of that world were peasants. Today, when the vast majority of the world’s population depends on global markets for their survival, the ability of one country to produce for all the others spells ruin, both for those who must be kept impoverished in order to maintain export prices, and for the vast multitudes whose labour is no longer necessary, but who, equally, can no longer rely on their own resources to survive. In this context the remainder of the world’s peasantry can no longer act as a weapon of modernisation, i.e. as a pool of both labour and consumer demand that can be drawn on in order to accelerate the pace of industrialisation. It becomes a pure surplus. This is true in India and sub-Saharan Africa — and in China.
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