China really isn’t that poor anymore. A lot of their recent productivity gains are coming from automation, and they are leaning into harder than the Japanese did in the 90s.
I'm going to push back a bit here: things are improving, and China is already as rich as Mexico...now I get that American's have a unjustly bad impression of Mexico because of poverty at the not very populated border, but Mexico isn't a poor country, nor is Thailand, etc...these are all middle income countries that are quickly approaching high income countries.
Having lived in China for 9 years, and left 9 years ago, I can't really justify calling China poor anymore. Ya, they have a huge rural area and they still have lots of poor people, but they have a huge middle class (even if it isn't a majority of the country) that can afford a lot of things.
Chinese wages remain about 6-10x lower than US workers expect for the same kind of job. Whether that's "poor" or not is arguable. There are much poorer nations. Nonetheless US wage levels simply aren't going to compete, and it isn't even close.
Right. When I was working in China, I was only making about half as much as I do now at Google. The gap is much smaller for SWEs, even my local colleagues weren't making much less than I did. China is definitely an upper middle-income country, officially and just by looking at the numbers. They are breaking into being a lower high-income country next, and the graph really isn't slowing down.
But they are going off a demographic cliff, and that is why they are investing heavily in automation. They just won't have the people to do this work in the future, and expanding abroad and investing in robots are the only options for them.
