China's reputation as a manufacturing powerhouse masks an uncomfortable truth: its workers are not particularly efficient. International Labor Organization estimates for 2025 put China's output per hour worked at $20 in constant 2021 international dollars - below the world average of $23 and roughly on par with Brazil and Mexico.
The gap with advanced economies is vast, "Hvylya" reports, citing a Foreign Affairs analysis by MIT economist Yasheng Huang. The United States recorded output of $82 per hour worked in 2025 - more than four times China's figure. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all significantly outperformed China as well.
"Many U.S. analysts wax on about China's remarkable productivity," Huang wrote. But the standard metric - economic output per hour worked - tells a very different story. China achieves its production dominance "not through efficiency but through scale," with firms boosting output by expanding working hours rather than improving processes.
Huang traced this pattern back to the warnings of Deng Liqun, a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party official who, in the early 1980s, cited Karl Marx's Das Kapital to sound the alarm about labor exploitation in China's newly liberalizing economy. Deng's warnings were ignored at the time, but the dynamic he described - extracting maximum output by extending labor rather than improving it - has become the foundation of China's industrial model.
The ILO data puts China's hourly productivity behind the global average and on par with economies that have a fraction of its industrial infrastructure - a gap of $62 per hour separating Chinese and American workers on the same metric.
Previously: Brookings Expert Reveals Why Trump's Trade Truce With Xi Hangs by a Thread.