That shift has already long-since occurred. Near enough any consumer good in the west will be marked “Made in China”. The exceptions are usually because of trade protectionism, which is an anti-competitive practice.
That is actually really weird. Usually countries are on a sort of wage spectrum. The poor countries will attract relatively low skill, but high work production like clothing, which requires low wages. The high income ones tend to have either dark factories for mass production or some high skill work for specialized products.
The weird part is that China does both. Usually countries when the get richer, loose the low skill low pay jobs to other countries. That has not happened in China. Part of that is probably the size of China, but still even rather large countries with a similar GDP per capita do not tend to be large low skill work countries anymore. For example Mexico and Brazil are roughly on the same level as China, but do not really export clothing.
You really would expect stuff like clothing, cheap toys, christmas decoration and so forth to come from Vietnam, India, Bangladesh and so forth. That really is not the case.
A lot of clothes do come from Bangladesh and Vietnam - but yeah, it’s more raw and intermediate products that come from low-GDP-per-capita nations these days.
This is, I think, probably quite a deliberate choice by China. I think their goal is to fundamentally capture as much international manufacturing as possible and be the factory of the world, which functionally gives them tremendous soft power over pretty much every other nation. For example, even US-manufactured munitions are made using components and materials from China, so if the US went to war with China, they could cut off the US’s supply and significantly impede their ability to manufacture munitions.
That’s just pure speculation, though. Occam’s razor would suggest they just want to do trademaxxing, which is also their official stance - though they wouldn’t put it in quite a succinct way, I suppose.
That is actually really weird. Usually countries are on a sort of wage spectrum. The poor countries will attract relatively low skill, but high work production like clothing, which requires low wages. The high income ones tend to have either dark factories for mass production or some high skill work for specialized products.
The weird part is that China does both. Usually countries when the get richer, loose the low skill low pay jobs to other countries. That has not happened in China. Part of that is probably the size of China, but still even rather large countries with a similar GDP per capita do not tend to be large low skill work countries anymore. For example Mexico and Brazil are roughly on the same level as China, but do not really export clothing.
You really would expect stuff like clothing, cheap toys, christmas decoration and so forth to come from Vietnam, India, Bangladesh and so forth. That really is not the case.
A lot of clothes do come from Bangladesh and Vietnam - but yeah, it’s more raw and intermediate products that come from low-GDP-per-capita nations these days.
This is, I think, probably quite a deliberate choice by China. I think their goal is to fundamentally capture as much international manufacturing as possible and be the factory of the world, which functionally gives them tremendous soft power over pretty much every other nation. For example, even US-manufactured munitions are made using components and materials from China, so if the US went to war with China, they could cut off the US’s supply and significantly impede their ability to manufacture munitions.
That’s just pure speculation, though. Occam’s razor would suggest they just want to do trademaxxing, which is also their official stance - though they wouldn’t put it in quite a succinct way, I suppose.