主题：削足适履的中国人口政策 -- 唵啊吽

the limited labor resource will push up china's labor rate and indirectly push China into a more tech-intensive growth pattern.

You live in Montreal, right?

North America, for more than 300 years, is short of labor. US is so devoted to new tech and machination because it is constantly short of labor (esp., skilled labor) in front of the large landmass. In the 19th century, the labor rate in States was constantly higher than in Europe. Europe was always richer with skilled labor than in States.

Whenever Europe was in turmoil and cut off labor export to America, American workers tended to enjoy big improvement in their pay. The most recent example is between 1938-1945, when war cut off labor import and there was big benefits to all american workers, including African Americans. US industrialists had long time bias against them in labor practice and then finally decided to employ them due to labor shortage.

Currently, Chinese capitalists can exploit Chinese colie with monthly 400RMB pay because Chinese are hard working and there is a labor oversupply. That problem will goes away in 10 years (assume the 6-8% GDP growth) and then China will enter labor shortage, at all levels.

Only labor shortage and thus labor rate increase will push the Chinese capitalists to treat labor well and use more automation technology to improve productivity. Back in 1990s, when Johnson & Johnson established its Shanghai JV to make Bandit--one step of automatic packaging by machine was replaced by young female workers. Their GM told me that it actually saved lots of money by de-automatization.

The reason is very simple: the pay rate is so low that the use of machine and automation is MORE COSTLY than using human beings.

In America, due to the high labor rate, we see constantly efforts to automate production process with machines--thus constant R&D effort in new tech. In China, you often see the opposite: HUMANIZATION OF THE former automatic production process.

China should be more like America than like India.

India is hopeless because capitalists have no incentive to invest in capital assets or R&D--the labor oversupply kills any such incentive.