THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

摘要

"Cheap, plentiful labor." Say these three words at a scrapyard in the United States or Europe, and you'll get stories about sprawling Chinese recycling facilities where migrant laborers hand-sort material too expensive to process in developed countries. It was supposed to last forever, this cheap, plentiful labor, providing China with an everlasting advantage in the global scrap markets, and giving exporters a guaranteed alternative to their domestic markets. But in the last two years, as the world's scrap exporters have been preoccupied with their recovery from the late-2008 market turmoil, China's scrap industry has been undergoing a dramatic yet little-noticed transformation.