Well, the last 40 years saw rising employment, not diminishing. Citing 40 years of development in this scenario is not valid since automation is a problem that has left even countries with highly skilled workforce perplexed. If China goes ahead with its plan to boost manufacturing with automation, it will cost jobs.
This shows how our India friends lack the basic knowledge about economic development.
Firstly, the so called “rising employment” has stopped since 2010 in manufacturing departments. It was reported, in major industrial centres, factories (especially those require low skilled workers) were struggling to find enough workers since then. The direct result is that general wage for workers has been growing dramatically.
Secondly, Chinese labour force has changed comparing to 30 years ago. In 1980s, most of Chinese workers only graduated from primary schools (6 years basic education), some of them were even less than that, they wouldn’t mind doing any low-income simply job in any factory, such as box folding, washing, screwing, etc. But today, all of them at least have 9 years education, majority of them graduate from high school or career training school, certainly they are expecting job requiring high skill with higher rewarding. This is a very ordinary phenomenon in the industrialisation, every developed country has gone through the same stage. In other words, the machine is not killing the job, the machine is brought in to fill the gap.
For example, one of my friends has been working in company producing equipment like lifting truck. Before 2010, their sales were quite poor, but after that, their products have become popular in the market. Why, logistic companies and warehouses can’t recruit enough manpower with even double wage.
The fact is Chinese government and manufacturing department have been waiting for this moment for quite long time. They have the necessary techs ready long time ago, but in order to keep their workers in job, they simply can’t take advantage of these. In 1990s, as a state owned company, we visited an American production who only had 35 workers. We estimated, with the same model, we can reduce 80% of Chinese workers required in the similar production line in China even with the Chinese tech. Considering China had quite a lot this kind of production lines at the time, this would save billions of RMB across the country. However, our plan was rejected by the government, the answer was: you must keep most of your workers. Last time I hear about was: in 2012, they finally updated the production line because most of workers already quite for better job.
There is no two ways about it. What remains to be seen is, in the absence of a democracy how much of the growth reaches the people.
So far, the democracy performed badly in producing the growth at all.
See can't type one paragraph without mentioning India. So predictable.
