Capitalist countries have avoided Marx’s epidemic of overproduction because they have come to recognize that workers are also consumers. These governments have let wages rise to drive up demand.
I am sure labor pressure had nothing to do with it.
China should learn from this example. It must enrich its own citizens by encouraging collective bargaining, providing social security, removing caps on wage growth, and raising the minimum wage. Doing so could allow China’s consumption to eventually match its production prowess. If Beijing does not adopt a more pro-worker stance, its economy will become more lopsided, trade tensions will rise, and Chinese citizens will not be able to reap the full benefits of the economic miracle that they have created and rightly deserve.
This means America will do the same, right? 
America will do the same, right? 
This article builds a whole narrative out of selectively framed ratios and then treats that as proof that China “forgot Marx.” It doesn’t hold up once you put the numbers back into their actual context.
Starting with the core claim about labour share in the “real economy” falling from 21% to 15%. That is not the whole economy. China is no longer an agriculture and factory-only system. Services accounted for 56.3% of GDP in 2023 and nearly half of employment, so isolating agriculture and industry and calling that the decisive measure of workers’ position is a narrow slice presented as a total picture. The article even admits service-sector wage shares are stable, then quietly sidelines that fact.
The same problem shows up in the manufacturing wage share numbers. Saying wages fell from 6.3% to 3.3% of output sounds dramatic until you ask what changed. China’s industry moved from labour-intensive assembly to capital-intensive production with far higher input costs, more automation, and longer supply chains. Of course the ratio shifts. That does not automatically mean workers are worse off. It means the composition of production changed. If you want to argue workers lost out, you have to show deterioration in their material conditions, not just one accounting ratio.
And on that point, the article quietly concedes the opposite. It admits incomes and living standards rose dramatically. That is not a footnote. That is the central fact. Official data show average annual wages in urban non-private units reached 120,698 yuan in 2023 and 124,110 yuan in 2024. China also built the largest social protection system in the world . Basic pension coverage exceeds 1.07 billion people, and basic medical insurance covers about 95% of the population. Nearly 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty. You cannot wave that away and then claim workers have been “squeezed” in any meaningful historical sense.
The international comparisons are even weaker. The UNIDO wage share figure the article relies on is from 2016. Using a single year of manufacturing-only data from nearly a decade ago to rank China today is already questionable. Then it compares countries at completely different stages of development and industrial structure as if those differences do not matter. That is not a serious comparative method.
The minimum wage section is simply wrong. The article claims Vietnam’s 2024 minimum wage was $692 per month. In reality, Vietnam’s regional minimum wages were roughly $137 to $197. China does not have a single national minimum wage, but in Shanghai it was around 2,690 to 2,740 yuan in 2025, roughly $370 to $380 depending on exchange rates. If the basic numbers are off, the conclusions built on them are not reliable.
The productivity argument is also misleading. China’s output per hour is lower than advanced economies. That is not surprising. It is a middle-income country still catching up technologically. The article jumps from that to saying China’s strength comes from “labour extraction” through longer hours. That is a leap. Productivity gaps reflect development level, capital stock, and technology. They do not automatically prove exploitation.
The BYD case is real and serious. Brazilian authorities reported “slavery-like conditions” at a construction site and filed a lawsuit. That should be condemned. But using one overseas incident involving contractors to generalise about an entire national system is not evidence. Chinese labour law explicitly requires wages to be paid on time and prohibits withholding. Violations exist, as they do everywhere. They do not define the system.
The argument that wage compression is the “root cause” of China’s manufacturing strength ignores how development actually works. China’s growth was driven by reinvesting surplus into infrastructure, industry, and public goods at a scale no developing country has matched. High-speed rail, mass electrification, universal basic healthcare coverage, and large-scale education expansion are not side effects. They are where a significant share of that surplus went.
On consumption, the article again treats a contradiction as a failure. Yes, China’s consumption share of GDP is lower than in advanced economies. Chinese policymakers openly acknowledge this and have been pushing to expand domestic demand. Retail sales reached 47.15 trillion yuan in 2023, and new policy plans in 2025 target consumption and services.
The claim about state-imposed wage ceilings is also overstated. Local wage guidance has existed, but it has been indicative, not a rigid nationwide cap suppressing wages across the economy. At the same time, minimum wages have been adjusted regularly at the provincial and municipal level based on local conditions. The idea that the state systematically froze wages while privileging officials is presented without serious evidence.
Finally, the Ford analogy is simplistic. You cannot raise wages arbitrarily without considering productivity, employment, and inflation. China’s approach has been to raise incomes through industrial upgrading, expansion of social security, and gradual increases in labour standards. That is why wages rose in absolute terms alongside massive improvements in living standards and social provision.
What this article does is take one dimension of distribution, isolate it from the rest of the system, and then declare that the entire model is fundamentally flawed. It ignores structural transformation, ignores social redistribution through public goods, uses outdated or incorrect comparisons, and treats contradictions as proof of failure rather than normal features of development.
China has real issues. Uneven development, regional gaps, and tensions between growth and consumption are all there. But those are being addressed through policy, not hidden. If you actually look at the full picture, what you see is not a country that “forgot Marx,” but one that transformed its productive base, improved material conditions for hundreds of millions of people, and is still working through the contradictions that come with that scale of change and the socialist transitionary period.