> It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.
No. Manufacturing labor cost in China is not cheap. In fact since 2012 or so, it is more expensive than in most of Asia. Companies who want cheap labor look elsewhere.
Labor is always a big driver of cost, because you need to plan, build, maintain and operate those factories with humans even if fully automated, and a lot of the indirect costs is going to scale with the price of labor, too (local legal representation, transport/logistics, ...)
That is objectively dirt-cheap compared to basically all of the west.
Yes, wages might be even cheaper in neighboring countries, but those lag behind in infrastructure, education, political stability, availability of capital and network effects from existing industry (and are thus not a viable alternative to China yet for lots of things).
> Manufacturing labor cost in China has surpassed parts of Eastern Europe.
This is a good point, but I think that only really the underdeveloped/underindustrialized/unstable parts really qualify, possibly Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, with similar caveats than Chinas neighbors.
Despite all this a lot of European manufacturing (e.g. cars), has shifted into the more viable low-wage countries over the last decades (despite language barriers and very high automation; talking mainly Poland, Slovenia, Hungary here).
You still need labor to build, maintain and operate factories, even if they are filled with robots; people here underestimate the benefit of cheap labor by a lot.
No. Manufacturing labor cost in China is not cheap. In fact since 2012 or so, it is more expensive than in most of Asia. Companies who want cheap labor look elsewhere.
https://www.economist.com/business/2023/02/20/global-firms-a... (Archive link: https://archive.fo/tdhXJ )
China is also the only major economy where wages have increased at the same rate as GDP in the last 40 or so years.