Its a common fallacy to say China, along with every non-developed countries is "pushing back progress" by employing people with low wages. Its not 75% of the world's population being underpaid, but the 25% being severaly, unfarely overpaid. Without China, those 75% would be getting $0, because they won't have a job at all, while a tiny fraction of world population "push forward progress", progress in their own incomes.

Labour is a commedity just like everything else, when there's a high demand and low supply, wages rise. Inversely when there's high supply, prices drop. What China's entry into world labour market, along with all the country the previous commentators brougt up, is to suddly expand the labour market from the western world into the word as defined by earth, and as a result, basic econmics dictates that all companies will pay the minium wage they can find for any certain task.

China, along with all the developing nations's low cost labour is only low cost to those in developed countries, where they have lived in an grossly distorted labour market too long. For a pair of shoes, for example, a worker in North America might makes $10 an hour before China's emergence, but that $10 an hour comes at the cost of 100 people elsewhere getting $0 an hour because they can't even apply for that job, regardless of how much more efficent they are than the person in North America.

China has lifted more than half a billion people out of poverty by doing precisely just that, that is what I call real progress. Real progress is not to fatten 5% of the world's population at the cost of starvation of the other 95%, it is to raise everyone's income equally.

Every coutry's first priority is their own national interest, developed countries are no exception. People ultimately cares more about their own welfare, and thus employment than the good of the world, that's why you see Americans complaining about the shifting of their jobs to lower wage countries. they then invent concepts such as 'unfair trade' or 'slave labour' to rationalize that simple desire, irregard of harm it will bring should it really be implimented.

The world, the earth-world without China was a word where 5% of people was pushing forward progress, their own benifits, at the cost, and often lives of the remaining 95%. China forced those 5% to give away their wealth to the other 95%, raising everyone's living standard except the original 5%. China is pushing back progress, yes, for the 5%, but China is pushing foward progress more than any other civilization in human history when you look at the world not as the "western world", but as the humanity-world.