ABSTRACT
China’s deepening integration into the global capitalist economy has had the effect of supplying the world with a massive cheap labor force. This chapter utilises the labor productivity and labor cost of foreign invested industrial enterprises in China to represent the productivity and cost of China’s manufacturing enterprises. Assuming that all goods imported from China are produced by foreign invested enterprises in China, it can be estimated that the Chinese goods imported by Britain were produced by about 240,000 Chinese workers in 1999 and 540,000 Chinese workers in 2007. Since then, the required labor input has steadily declined. In 2017, British imports from China were produced by about 310,000 Chinese workers. In 1998, China’s labor cost per worker was 6 percent of the labor compensation per employee in the British manufacturing sector. China’s deeper integration into the global capitalist division of labor since the 1990s has provided the global economy with a new large cheap labor force.
