JOSEPH KAHN is more concerned about equality than growth:

Guangdong has grown by more than 10 percent annually for the past decade. But its factory workers, mostly migrants from the interior, earn no more today than they did in 1993, several Chinese studies have found. The average wage of $50 to $70 a month also buys less today than it did in the early 1990's, meaning workers are losing ground even as China enjoys one of the longest and most robust expansions in modern history.

This is partly a paradox of globalization. China has attracted more foreign investment by far than any other developing country, nearly $500 billion since it began internationalizing its economy. But it continues to draw capital essentially because it is willing to rent workers for falling returns.

The free-market economic policies have not left China worse off on the whole. They have lifted it out of the ranks of the world's poorest countries, created a nascent middle class of service industry workers in the big cities, and made China the largest Asian exporter to the United States.

But China is living through a Gilded Age of inequality, whose benefits are not trickling down to the 700 million or 800 million rural residents who live off the land or flock to the cities for factory or construction jobs.

(Emphasis mine.) But doesn't the fact that rural residents flock to the cities for factory or construction jobs mean that the work is better there than off in the countryside? And if wages are raised, doesn't that mean there will be fewer jobs to go around, and less of them will get money? Still, there are major abuses:

...many lower-level officials participate in exploiting the workers. State-financed construction projects often fail to pay the workers they hire. The reason, it is assumed, is that bureaucrats and favored businessmen pocket the money. Many coal mines do not install safety equipment, and the death toll in accidents has been well in excess of 5,000 annually. (China in 2003 produced about 40 percent more coal than the United States but had at least 130 times more mining fatalities.)

The foreign-financed export sector is less dangerous. But the factories that produce the world's goods operate on marathon 12-hour shifts, rarely pausing on Sundays. Workers live in crowded dormitories with communal bathrooms that lack hot water in winter or fans in summer.

Guangdong legally requires a 40-hour workweek, a minimum wage, before overtime, of about $72 a month, as well as medical insurance and pension plans. But factory managers said in interviews over the past year that the only people who care about these standards are managers for foreign companies. And these people, factory bosses say, are easily deceived.

(Emphasis mine again.) Anti-globalists, take note: it's the foreign companies that are concerned about upholding basic standards.