We would all like to see wages and working conditions in China improve. The main dynamic for those improvements will be, IMHO, the growing economy of China itself and not outside pressure (although I’m not against outside pressure like you suggest). And it’s happening. The NY Times recently reported on labor unrest in China (here):

“Although the walkouts were quelled with higher salaries, sometimes doubled, factory owners and labor experts said that the strikes have driven home a looming reality that had been predicted by demographers: the supply of workers 16 to 24 years old has peaked and will drop by a third in the next 12 years, thanks to stringent family-planning policies that have sharply reduced China's population growth.

“The other new reality, perhaps harder to quantify, is that young Chinese factory workers, raised in a country with rapidly rising expectations, are less willing to toil for long hours for appallingly low wages like dutiful automatons. At the same time, China has rapidly expanded university enrollments, resulting in an already dwindling number of less-educated workers willing to accept the rigors and monotony of assembly lines.”

China still has a reservoir 300-600 million peasants living in very primitive conditions. They, especially their young, often still find those Apple factories, even with those terrible wages and working conditions, preferable to rural agricultural working conditions.

Part of the dynamic is the movement of low wage factories to the interior (west) of China, where wages are lower but transportation costs for exporting are greater. I just attended a talk on China’s effort to develop the river transportation infrastructure of the Yangtze River in a centrally planned effort to move industrialization westward (and to bring into the global market economy, both as workers and consumers, more of the rural Chinese peasants) (see here).

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