It's still economically viable to manufacture in China

It is. 

In recent years there has been a constant buzz about factories in Vietnam and Thailand. Mostly based on the idea that low labor wages are the key to cheap products. I won’t deny that low labor wages affect the cost of making a product, but as I tell a few of my colleagues in China, there are other factors that come in to play here:

a.    Infrastructure:  China has invested over the last decade in the confection of roads, trains and ports. China has especially strengthened their container transport system in ports at Dalian, Tianjin, Qingdao, shanghai, Ningbo, Xiamen and Shenzhen. These ports are listed among the top 50 container ports in the world and each one exceeds freight volumes of over 100 million tons a year, number that Vietnamese ports cannot reach. 

b.      Skill labor worker: the Chinese labor workers have a lot of experience working in an array of manufacturing factories (from plastic to textile). Unless you are buying arts and crafts from Vietnam, the experience of the Chinese labor workforce will ensure the quality and minimize the problems of the products they are producing.  

c.   Supply chain: as mentioned in an article by The Economist citing Professor Zheng Yusheng of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, the right way to measure manufacturing competitiveness is not by comparing labor costs alone, but by comparing entire supply chains.   This means if you do not have a certain supplier of a component that is necessary for a product a factory produces, it might make it uneconomic to make it in that area, as opposed to make it in a place where it has available all that it needs. 

d.      Productivity:  we agree that Chinese labor wages are rising, but is so is their productivity.  They are paid more basically because they can produce more. 

e.      Local Market:  factories can also curve their costs in China especially if they are producing for both the Local market and the international market.