It’s interesting you should mention this.

I was at a conference a couple of years ago and met with a government official who explained that for a great deal of the process of reform it was an active policy to take products manufactured in the west and then reverse engineer them as low-technology, labour intensive production processes – because labour was cheaper and much more abundant then technological solutions.

What was interesting was that this is exactly the opposite of what companies have been trying to do for in the west for the past twenty years.

The implication of this, is that China has actively sought to take established production cycles and reduce the amount of productivity per person.