China has grown by more than 6 percent every year since the late 1970s, with rates that sometimes exceeded double digits and lifted the poverty of 700 million Chinese (using many other millionaires).
Decades of migration from the countryside to the cities have led to a large contingent of workers already earning the highest urban wages.
Migration would have made the rural labor market tighter, and the remaining rural workers would already have greater bargaining power to ask for higher wages.
The large public investments in backward infrastructure, as well as new social security and cash transfer programs.