So this is the difference between an engineer and an "economist".
So just answer some questions: JAPAN also had no resources besides labor. They only crossed the 3000 USD/capita threshhold in 1972. Yet what would you say about Japan today?
China imports most of its resources. We have iron ore and oil just sitting in the ground and the government refuses to dig it up, instead we spend our FOREX to buy it. What's that mean?
India has far lower labor rates than we do. But due to their inefficient infrastructure and bureaucracy, they'd have to pay NEGATIVE wages to make a product there profitable. Labor is about 15% of the added value of a product. China's advantage is clearly not in labor.
Wake up, it's the 21st century. Robots already do most of the work anyways. What, you think in heavy industry, people can actually lift 10000 ton parts? Or people can make ICs by hand? Or even textiles are made by hand?
China is heavy on production of process products such as steel (40% of world production) and chemical fiber (60% of world production). Process engineering is all automatic. It isn't even possible to make it not automatic. Where's the labor in that?
the labor cost is for engineers to design the system and technicians to keep it running, but mostly for management. That's it. I worked in a chemical plant before. Labor cost is not a constraint on process industries.
It doesn't matter what labor you have, other countries get sucked dry despite also having textile industries like China, only China's and otherly newly industrialized countries makes money. Textile industries in other countries import their chemical fiber because they lack the materials industry to support their textiles. In 2006, mainland China's textile industry was only 6% of exports, but was 5x as large as #2 Taiwan, 6x as large as #3 South Korea and #4 India. While textiles is seen as a "low wage" industry, in reality, its highly industrialized. It drove the industrial revolution 300 years ago, and its driving the same industrialization today. The machines needed for fiber and textile production are the constraints on production, not labor.
In the end, labor costs are nearly meaningless except for industries that are constrained by labor costs. These, however, are mostly service jobs that cannot be outsourced. Lowering costs for manufacturing are almost always due to capital investments into new machinery, especially for process industries that are fully automated.
Global-production.com - Textiles