From Development Bank Research Bulletin (link):
China has been said to be the World’s factory and cheap labor is said to be the reason why China attracts most of the manufacturing activities away from developed countries as well as from other developing countries.
Africa’s wage level is much lower than China, but they are never on the radar screen as threat to China’s position though. Nevertheless, let’s make a more relevant comparison between China and India.
India has a hard time in attracting manufacturing firms to move there. Many Indians attribute the “failure” to “that’s because we don’t have cheap labor; we focus on service industry with higher value-added.”