But neither of those points says much, does it? You would expect more labour militancy where the alternative is mass suicide, toxic work environments with spiking cancer rates, etc. Second, wages are bound to increase when the economy is growing at a good clip. No?
I can understand the argument against China: they are able to undercut US labour costs by throwing millions of bodies with bottom of the barrel wages imposed by an authoritarian government, “theft” of proprietary material (“intellectual property” if you believe in that term), so on. That costs US jobs, the kind of jobs both US and Chinese workers should have - decent wage, civil rights, etc.
The argument in defence of China, from what I can tell are these: (a) don’t be nationalistic, provincial, or (b) Chinese manufacturing is not taking jobs from the US: exports to the US make up only X%, where X is a small number.
I do not think (a) is an argument. I am not sure what (b) says. Yes, Chinese exports to the US might be a small % of their total exports, but that does not necessarily imply that US imports from China are a small % of US manufacturing. Perhaps it is not worthwhile anyway for the US to be making the low end stuff that is farmed out to China. But take India: IT job flight to India is a real issue, isn’t it? People like to point out that IT jobs are going unfilled in the USA. That’s true: when I was recruiting for the last startup I was in, we had a tough time finding good people. But that’s because we were picky and wanted certain kinds of talents. The people who turned up for job interviews were “softer”, but these are exactly the sort of jobs that have moved [first] to India and these are also the jobs that gave these people (who had lesser education and therefore familiarity with fancy IT terminology, more family commitments and therefore lesser time for geekery, etc) a shot at a decent life. India is a different political environment than China, and the IT workers in India are ascendant and bristling with demands, not suppressed and exploited. But my point is that work does leave the country at a cost to the local population, and when the jobs go to countries with lesser freedoms but also countries that are active today in asserting their self-interest internationally (such as in Africa), nobody wins.
—ravi