Washington Post: Blue-collar laborers, in interviews with The Washington Post, described a shift precipitated by many factors: a top-down decision to automate Chinese manufacturing, the offshoring of many jobs to countries with even cheaper labor and a sharp falloff in demand for construction workers amid a years-long real estate crisis.
…The high levels of inequality and unemployment are contributing to the view among some analysts and experts that China will never surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP…