The minimum wage of the United States today is about 7.25 per hour. When I had my first job parking cars the minimum wage was $1.60 hourly. A minimum wage increase of several million or hundreds of millions of people is a large chunk of change. The U.S. minimum wage hasn't gone up much in a half century.
China hasn't got a nation-wide minimum wage. The minimum wage is set at a provincial level and of course people living in cities need and get higher minimum wages than country folk. About 470 million Chinese work in cities. I believe the minimum wage in Shanghai is about $1.20 an hour. It is less for the 270 million rural workers generally. The scale of even modest, nation-wide increases in minimum wages in China has immediate, large effects on the cost of made in China products sold globally.
Maybe western ideologues will expect Chinese communist leadership to duplicate western models of sending proplits of rising prosperity to CEOs instead of workers and to keep minimum wages down. I believe that's unreasonable. In the west the voters have need trained to be like good communists and accept low minimum wages and submit to low tax flummery and profit lion shares for the rich. In China the communist leadership may not only worry about being replaced if they don't raise worker minimums and increase average standard of living; they could be accused of counter-revolutionary activity.
Chinese workers, like Americans, want an increase in minimum wages. For about 77 million people to have meaningful wage increase means costs need be passed on to consumers. In other words, even without tariffs the cost of made-in-China goods was destined to increase in order to increase the Chinese standard of living. The U.S.A. did need to eventually return to material production many of the items outsourced to China in order to raise U.S. minimum wages much.
Chinese workers, like Americans, want an increase in minimum wages. For about 77 million people to have meaningful wage increase means costs need be passed on to consumers. In other words, even without tariffs the cost of made-in-China goods was destined to increase in order to increase the Chinese standard of living. The U.S.A. did need to eventually return to material production many of the items outsourced to China in order to raise U.S. minimum wages much.
The growth in the U.S. economy since the 1970s sent a disproportionate percent of profit to the rich instead of sharing proportionately with workers via minimum wage increases. Instead of minimum wage increases consumers following the end of the Cold War 1.0 got deflation on the cost of select consumer goods made in China, Thailand, Vietnam etc. It is likely that Chinese wages will rise even as the labor participation rate declines because of aging of the Chinese population. For the U.S. minimum wage to triple ( a small yet significant reparation for the relative stagnation of minimum wage the past half century) domestic production would need to increase, taxation on capital gains increase and the cost of government be reduced with increased efficiency.
Needless to say environmental protections need be strongly reinforced because of the extreme stress on the environment created by the vast global demographic facts of population and countless deleterious economic environmental externalities (i.e. microplastics).
