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.
