You mean "play fair" as in "please do like we say and let your billion people be poor and eat raddish all year long"?
This is a joke. From Chinese (and most other parts of the world) standing point, the West has never played fair. It started with drug war, when British cannons forced the Chinese customs to open the doors to opium boats. Then it was nuclear power, when everyone was asked to NOT do as the US did and not try to get their hands on nukes. Now that Chinese people finally have their industrial revolution, and can start getting their head out of the mud, you're asking them to "play fair" and stop working hard because they are "stealing" your jobs? You are probably asking them to not buy 2 cars per family, to not use washing machine to wash their clothes, and to not take planes to discover the world's nice places, right? So it is pure "do like we say, do not do like we do", right?
A joke, I say.
The point of US civil war was that the industrialized North wanted to rid of slavery and the agricultural South wanted to go on with slave-dependent growing of cotton etc.
Likewise, places where formal abolition of slavery was more recent (e.g. Kingdom of SA and Yemen until 1962, Oman until 1970, etc) are hardly industrial nations.
(Yes, this is not the complete picture and things are not straightforward or simple: compare to slave labor in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, etc, where some of it was used in industrial-type activities, and even R&D, as described by Solzhenitsyn in In The First Circle; however, you could describe these as solutions for war-time economy, and not sustainable.)
And also, I see that argument and my take away is that the solution to our economic woes is to sabotage the industrial sector of places like China.
Liberal immigration policy and real opportunity (because of the previous) lead to an influx of people probably above average in their motivation / skills which probably helped a lot too. I wish we'd remember this lesson today...
I'm not trying to discount American culture / ideals. I love living in San Francisco because of this - most of the good of American culture without many of the downsides.
The bad news is that companies are now looking towards exploiting other countries like Bangladesh or Vietnam.
The other good news is, that shouldn't result in a lot of US jobs being lost, as the consumer market is now bigger (with Chinese consumers starting to add to demand) and the supply of cheap labor won't increase by 300 million in 10 years (like it did when China opened up).
Bangladesh garments sectors amount to 80% of their export business. It employs mostly poor village women who was house wife before, or house maids or beggars or seasonal work; all of which paid even less money than the garments industry does. Which is why, there are less people available for house maids, or seasonal farming work.
Garments workers who goes on strike for higher wage are the minority, because they somehow figured out the game that if they make enough noise and if the media picks it up the garments owner will be forced to raise the wage; even when they are well above the minimum wage for garments set up the government.
Seriously no one is forcing anyone to work at lower wage.
- There is a minimum wage set for garments workers, which might not be up to western standard, but people in bangladesh do quite good with it.
- There is no lack of garments work available in BD, if they don't like the wage or the working condition they can always go work somewhere else.
- While there exists poor working environments in the some garments, overwhelming most of them (from my personal experience) has pretty good standards with safe environment.