
Re: This is probably for the best...
most people who live in democracies don't like underwriting human rights abuses
This is ABSOLUTELY true. Too many "sweatshop" examples, among other things.
From the article: "Rising wages in China made the nation less attractive to outside investors"
I think better working conditions for the people doing the work might BENEFIT China (and the image they project to the world) rather than what they've ACTUALLY done - that is, they should have been improving the wages AND freedom for their huge swath of cheap labor employees, instead of ramping up the (alleged) human rights abuses, implementing some kind of social scoring system, generally cracking down on freedom [in Hong Kong for example], and shipping people off to re-education camps (like certain religious people, in particular certain Islam believers), as well as potentially _threatening_ the world by (allegedly?) withholding critical supplies for (allegedly?) political reasons during a pandemic... yeah, maybe *THOSE* things too. And don't forget "The Great Firewall" and possibly even worse spying than NSA could ever think up, when world-wide communications networks are routed through servers owned by Chinese companies. Yeah, THOSE things, too.
I believe that THIS is what is driving corporate decision-makers away from manufacturing in China, In My Bombastic Opinion. They're just "too communist" and didn't soften up like we expected them to.
Still, I would expect that Mexico and Central America are (in many ways) the future for labor-intensive processes, at least for the next decade or two. Similarly, African nations as well as Vietnam, the Phillipines, and so forth.