中国劳动力市场转型

So as we've been hearing, one of the key features of the changing economic landscape in China is the rise of the country's middle class. Young people in China today who've often benefited from a good education don't want a low-wage job that doesn't use their skills. Is the rising Chinese wage bill likely to dull the country's competitive edge? I spoke to George Magnus, senior independent adviser to the Swiss bank UBS. And first, Dr Qian Liu, deputy director of the China Forecasting Service in the Economist Intelligence Unit.

"When people talk about China, before, people think about sweatshops, cheap labour, "Made in China", but that's changing. Now the wages have been rising about 15% every year in the past five years. And that's a phenomenon. And that means for the manufacturing factories, they need to climb up the value-added chain, because they know that they need new innovative products for them to be competitive in the market all over again, not just domestic market, but also global market. So that's on the wage side. Another important input cost would be capital cost. Now it's very fair to say that, for China, it's very much of an investment-driven story. The government has been artificially suppressing the interest rate so that encourages more of the investment story. And that needs to change because the current way cannot be lasting forever."