Other than what the other person said I don't think it's just wages.
I'd say decades of having western manufacturing exported there in large part because of those wages, stability, etc leads to a country that's now just simply good at manufacturing. With diversified supply options, plenty of experienced human capital, automation skills and companies.
A different place like India or some place in africa can have those low wages and plenty of people but lack the supply chains, automation experience and infrastructure, etc
You are absolutely correct that just low wages by themselves are not enough to attract manufacturing on a global scale.
There are a lot of prerequisites (power/transport infrastructure, capable workers, political stability, organizational know-how) plus also network effects and advantages from local demand, and Chinese government did a really good job at providing all this over the last half-century.
But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.
I also really wanted to stress this because people love to gloss over this wage-gap, and pretend that US manufacturing would get an immediate resurgence if we only abolished environmental regulations, or gave industry juicy tax-breaks/incentives, or invested heavily into relevant education programs-- but IMO those arguments are mostly a sham, and the core problem is that US workers are neither willing to work for $5/h nor are consumer willing to pay the difference.
>But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.
It may be the biggest but at this point i think the combined corpus of other factor outweighs it insofar that it would take a long time for things to slowly come back.
At least for factories that aren't sweatshop work or primarily manual conveyor belt work.
Even in those later ones (I did automation for one in the food industry that literally can't move far abroad) it's insane how much of the endless amount of components that keep it all running came from china.
I think your best bet other than just wage is both education adjustments and gov incentive that works primarily from the bottom up rather than from the top down like countries in general in the west tend to try.
After all if i get a tax credit or grant or what have you for locally produced....idk keyboards...the cheapest way for me is still to get every component from china and to assemble here using a PnP machine manufactured in...you guessed it.
