Source?

But more concretely, there was just an article share here about how Apple moved all of its iPhone production back to China. It had moved some to India, but the defect rate was too high for them.

That accusation is incorrect. China has full production of tons of stuff and primarily imports raw materials. They achieve low costs through efficient utilities and public goods (transit, e.g.) and tightly integrated and dense supply chains. Making a ton of stuff in the same country with efficient rail is one reason why they can keep costs low.

Marxist nerds pore over economic stats to ask questions about net exploitation and so on. Michael Roberts is one of them and his positions in this tend to be pretty good.

So the questions this leaves me with are these:

• What countries are they exploiting the cheap labor of?
• What labor-intensive tasks are they outsourcing?
• How does this notion square up against China’s adoption of productive automation?

You should think about this claim a bit more.

First of all, is it Chinese or non-Chinese corporations doing this? China and Chinese companies don’t have the hegemonic advantage where just the fact of them being Chinese implies superiority.

If non-Chinese corporations are using China for “just” assembling the components, then this implies that it is an easy process with a low value add and these corporations can just move this process to these poorer countries where labour is cheaper and take this exploitative money-grubbing China out of the equation.

My point is that China does not have the hegemonic advantage where it can impose its will upon the rest of the world. Western economies are beholden to China. This is for the reason that China provides them with some things that no other economy can.

China takes part in imperialist plunder by outsourcing all labour intensive tasks to poorer countries to exploit cheap labour, and only the final assembly is done in China anymore.

Sounds like utter bullshit. If anything, China is outsourcing the final assembly (and also countless other value-added processes along the way) to poorer countries as their needs see fit- helping them move up the value chain, promote regional trade and development, and, in the case of countries like Mexico, Vietnam, Hungary, or Turkey- giving them a (very lucrative and mutually beneficial) slice of the pie in exchange for circumventing illegal western sanctions and trade-war tariffs.

I’ll let this question stand, but I’d rather us not do debate or question by proxy. Especially if it’s completely unsourced like this one.

In the Hong Kong S.A.R. you can hire a Filipino or Indonesian domestic helper for $4000 HKD (~$500 USD) per month. It’s a whole industry here that’s been around since before the handover. I’d guess that fits the definition of outsourced, cheap foreign labour.

Aside from Hong Kong, the other two places in China where you can do that are Macau and Taiwan: The other formerly-colonized autonomous region, and the province governed by a US puppet government.

In the rest of China it’s illegal, the concept is considered unethical, and the way foreign domestic helpers are treated in Hong Kong is considered morally repugnant.

I’m not qualified to speak on the matter, but I’ve only heard anything like this in the context of Temu and Shein, which, assuming that’s true, I’d like to think is more of an exception than the rule in the whole of China.

I don’t have the book on hand but Johnathan Ross has calculations in the book China’s Great Road that show China’s labor terms of trade (how much labor-time does China give to trading partners vs how much does it receive, a ratio of 1 would mean equitable trade).

China from the 50s to the early 2000s had terms of trade <1 (net exporting labor) with nearly all countries, as China started as the poorest on earth per capita. China was giving other global south countries more labor than it consumed from them.

Starting in the 2000s China was taking in more labor from some countries in the GS than it received, but this can be due to the fact that China was able to keep a some of its own dead labor (MoP) due to its socialist economy (and socialist bloc trade), shifting more of its labor toward new domestic production because production in socially important sectors became less labor intense with automation. China is still net exploited by the Imperialist bloc.

However, China is not comfortable with this relationship, which is why it has been exporting capital to the poorest countries to free labor-time in the GS in sectors like Cobalt and Lithium that are extremely labor intense unless an Imperialist corp has coerced state or has been allowed private security over investments, i.e. only western owned mines are allowed heavy machinery. China is rather selling the machinery to the country instead of purchasing the rights to consume the resources directly as the West does. Some will think “but capital exports (in this case machinery, loans) are Imperialist”, but you’ll actually see even in Lenin’s time that Imperialists states invested predominantly in trade partners bound by military pacts, the US exports mostly to other Imperialists bound through NATO, OCED, and defense pacts in TW, ROK, Japan, or if it’s in the GS they ensure they are able to exercise sovereignty over purchased land from them.

This is not without contradictions. China’s investments in the GS are often benefiting the existing anti-worker, anti-Indigenous, classes’ interests. Such is the case in Latin America and many African states such as Congo. Again though, often the 3W state has to relocate people (not a pretty process, and is class warfare) to expropriate land because it is easier to take from their own citizens than from the Imperialist countries who bought of stole existing mines/factories/farms due to Colonialism.

To my knowledge, no. But Outlets like Alibaba, Temu and Shein, do enable sweatshops to go unnoticed, which is unacceptable