Manufacturing in China - Percentage of World

[Aro]

I read someplace (maybe in an article by Paul Theroux) that China is now the (by far) the worlds leading manufacturer / maker of things.

I think this only applies to what I would call ‘tat’, like christmas decoraions, bobbles, toys, nik-naks et al.

The article said that about 94% of all things made (in the world) are now made in China.

Is this figure accurate? Are the wages / conditions in areas of China so low that ALL manufacturing of ‘tat’ has relocated there?

(I have kept an eye out whilst shopping, and out of 4-5 shops I aws in last night, I found only ONE item which was not ‘Made in China’, a pencil made in Czech. Rep.)

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Actually, yeah, 94% sounds about right. Basically everything you buy here anymore says “Made in China”, too. And it’s not just “tat”–I just bought a new Microsoft wheel mouse, and it says “Made in China” on the box.

I can’t find the “94%” statistic itself offhand, but I found this.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/26/1038274302681.html

Woken giant is a world-beater
By Ross Gittins
November 27 2002

…What all this growth means is that if you allow for the fact that one US dollar purchases a lot more in China than it does in Japan, China’s economy is already the second-biggest in the world, and already 25 per cent bigger than Japan’s.

Unless it’s knocked off its present trajectory, it should overtake America in size some time in the 2020s.

< snip >

China doesn’t yet have the dominance in world trade that its size would suggest. But just give it time - and consider its rate of advance. In 1990 it was the world’s 15th-biggest trading nation; now it’s the sixth.

And get this: manufactured goods account for 90 per cent of China’s exports. Those exports are dominated by simpler, labour-intensive goods such as clothing, footwear, toys, sporting and travel goods (or, as my family of Queenslanders would say, “ports”).

Increasingly, however, it’s exporting more valuable goods - household electrical items, including air-conditioners, televisions and washing machines. And it now accounts for about 5 per cent of global computer and office machine exports (though many of these are assembled from imported components).