Most of the time, I don't personally look at it as cheap labour because I am just ordering, e.g. 60,000 of something or 100,000 of something else.
It's cheap, yes. I can indeed buy 1,000 of something more locally or from other than China.
But when it comes to scale, needing vast shipments, then they are the ones who can actually ship it and do it reliably. It just also happens to be cheaper, too, which is more of a convenience or cherry on top, than the actual attractive part: vast scale.
China sent tiktok the the US, the gifted geniuses of silicon valley duplicated it and when their clones were garbage they just took it and said "we own this now"
It's not remotely cheap. A long time ago the cheap labor moved from places like China to places like Mexico, which is one of the reasons so many automotive manufacturing plants there - just a rail ride across the border.
Now that hasn't been the case for more than a decade. The cheap labor is in SE Asia and South America.
What China has is decades of process improvement, factories, infrastructure, experience, and a willingness to work. They haven't been the cheapest, by far, for a long while.
I don't now about Japanese manufacturing per se, but I definitely wouldn't say that finished Japanese products were considered dodgy in the 80s. Sony, Panasonic, Honda, Toyota, various camera brands, Yamaha.. I recall all of those being at least "pretty good".
I definitely remember the sense that Japanese cars posed a real threat to the American auto industry, and in hindsight that seems to have been well founded.
>but then lost their edge as China moved itself up the car manufacturing hierarchy
Didn't they lose their edge earlier and because the US togheter with some european nations forced their arm after a trade war to limit their exports, enforce an unfavourable currency regime, etc?
That's the entire point of the joke, yeah. Japanese manufacturing was dodgy in the 50s-60s but great by the 80s.
Korean manufacturing might've been considered dodgy in the 80s but great by 2000. Taiwan (ROC) went through this also (70s vs 90s, ish?). And now China.
The older generation made huge sacrifices with no wage growth because the CCP kept the currency low.
This allowed for China to choose industries it would dominate outside of economic forces. It chose to dominate solar and was allowed to sell panels below raw materials cost in order to kill competition.
In one hand it’s good for world solar, on the other hand this has helped cause the rise of the far right all over the west.
