Yeah sure. Actually, the rug can be pulled right out from China if their cheap labor becomes too pricey. You'd see foreign manufacturers pull their operations out of China fast looking for a better deal. China has a long ways to go when it comes to innovating ideas which really creates wealth, and may I point out, the US is world leader at innovation.
"Actually, the rug can be pulled right out from China if their cheap labor becomes too pricey."
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Chinese labor rates to catch up to the rest of the world. The Chinese had been preventing their poor in rural areas from migrating to the cities until recently. Now there are hundreds of millions moving to the large cities where the jobs are. They are delighted to work long hours under conditions that no American worker would tolerate for pennies per hour. The supply far, far outweighs the demand, even with China's hyper economy. This is the largest human migration in world history by a wide margin - hundreds of millions of them.
I'm not as doom and gloom as this author seems to be, but China and India represent a huge economic challenges that we as a nation will have to address in the very near future. I just saw an article about Brazil's rapidly expanding agriculture sector. They are sueing the US through the WTO to get us to remove cotton subsidies. If that goes through, they will clear millions of more acres to be put into agricultural production over the next few years.
Newt Gingrich has said that 3 types of reform are critical to meet the new economic challenges that we will face in the 21st century
1. tort
2. health care
3. tax
That would certainly be a good start.
I recently heard that the number of just the unemployed Chinese workers surpasses all the factory workers in the world outside of China.