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You'll be unable to paint an alternative scenario for bypassing the process of gradual wage increases because it would never work in reality. What was China going to do, warp straight to having an economy with $60,000 GDP per capita? If things actually worked that way, countries as diverse as Romania, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Mexico - they'd all do it too. It doesn't work that way. You have to move up, gradually, through a very long and grinding road of progress and persistence. Subtract the companies that provide the jobs for developing nations, and you have nothing. And you can't give a single other example throughout modern industrial history for an alternative path, because there can't be one. The capital investment has to come from outside, it has to be incentivized (otherwise why bother), and or you have to very slowly build it up from development internally + foreign trade (and that internal development will be accomplished by corporations just the same, just as it also was in China by domestic companies that behave just like Apple or worse). Name a country that has skipped from poor and developing to affluent and developed without going through it (specifically without relying overwhelmingly on natural resources like oil, those are extreme outliers). |
They have a geographic advantage too, but no one had to make Singapore a central shipping hub, it could have been anywhere else.
This is how you do it. There’s no other way. Eastern Europe is an interesting work in progress at the same thing. But the Ukraine war has really put a spanner in the works.