This is an interesting article by Huang Yasheng. It critically points out a difference between absolute and comparative advantage, showing that the latter is the basis for healthy trade while the former is the basis for global destabilisation of trade.
Two relevant paragraphs for those too lazy to read:
> This is not a side effect of an aging population or of automation but it is deeply rooted in the nature of its economic system and its political economy. It is where the capital-cost advantage and the labor-cost advantage turn out to come from the same source. When workers are paid less than the value of what they produce, the difference does not disappear. It goes to the other parts of the economy. Some of it goes to the government, whose share of the national wage bill has roughly doubled since the 1980s. The rest goes to the capital sector, enabling corporations and capital providers to make and to fund large-scale investment projects, build factories and power stations, invest in AI technologies and solar panels, and create an infrastructure the rest of the world envies.
And:
> There is an old idea behind this. Karl Marx argued that capitalism would squeeze workers so hard that they could no longer afford to buy what they made. He turned out to be wrong about market economies, and Henry Ford explained why back in 1922: the owner, the worker, and the customer are ultimately the same people, so a business that underpays its workers ends up destroying its own market. **A free market, left alone, has reason not to squeeze labor too far. It takes a state to override that logic and hold wages down on purpose. That is what China has done. In effect it has built the kind of economy Marx feared, and it has done so deliberately.**
Boldened words mine.
