Ashley’s Reviews > The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage > Status Update

Covered in soot, sucking down smog, the people in these communities live with pollution because their livelihood depends on the industries making them sick.

Coal more than any other product lies at the heart of the China price. More than 2/3 of china's energy supplies comes from coal, a higher ratio than either Japan or the United States. The country is the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world. Coal keeps China's economic engine, including the export factories, pumping like pistons near the coast. It is also china's dominant source air pollution.

China's millions of migrant workers are very vulnerable to occupational disease. Some 90% of victims of occupational disease in china are believed to be migrants. Migrant workers tend to take the most dangerous, dirty, exhausting jobs. Those least likely to adhere to national laws for health and safety.

There are over 400000 factories of the Providence period in 2007, Guangdong's Gross domestic product $446.7 billion. It's gross domestic product would have been larger than that of Saudi Arabia or Iran, and approximately the same as Sweden.

Within Guangdong's borders are some of the largest factories on Earth, including an electronics plant, with some 270000 workers. The world's largest television maker, making millions of TV sets every year. The largest sofa manufacturer, the largest artificial christmas tree factory, china's leading telecommunications equipment makers, and hundreds of thousands of other plants.

The first people to arrive at the Canton Fair, the massive biannual trade show that draws so many importers each year, are the migrant workers. They are the authors of China's extraordinary growth. Called by the people who build the skyscrapers that dot the City skylines and assemble the shoes that are cheap enough to cause trade wars. The Canton Fair is a showcase of their handiwork.

They have come to pay homage to one thing, the China price. Inside the many massive of halls of the convention center are thousands of companies pedaling countless products made in China. Sweaters, showers, power drills, plates, jacuzzi's, cell phones, SUVs, plastic trees. Everything. For half or even a fifth of what it would cost to make in the US.