If you've been to China and made some friends, you'll know that Chinese friends are nosy. They ask about your salary outright. My friends in China love www.salary.com and they use it compare their own income to their counterparts in the States.

I always tell them that the less labor there is to a job, the less of a gap in income between the two countries. Investment bankers in Shanghai get paid as much as their counterparts in the U.S. But injection press operators and street sweepers in China get paid much less than their American counterparts. And those labor-intensive jobs have been filled by migrant workers in the past three decades when the labor-cost advantage enabled China to attract foreign investment and prosper as an export-led nation.

But China may have come to the point where its hiring model for manufacturing and low-end service industries is in need of an overhaul. Maybe manufacturing jobs will eventually have to be localized and pay more.

That way, the kind of tragedy that struck Shenzhen-based plastics recycler Longfei when a fire broke out and killed 15 migrant workers sleeping in a factory attic won't happen again.

That way, there won't be the transportation frenzy like the one this past winter when snowstorms hit southern China just as millions of migrant workers tried to go home before the Chinese New Year.

That way, a natural disaster won't torture so many more elsewhere -- right now, many of the families of the migrant workers who were employed in Chengdu when last month's earthquake and subsequent aftershocks struck are drenched in sorrow; many migrant workers who are from Chengdu but were working in other locations also are suffering, because when the tragedy hit, they were not with their families. What can be more heartbreaking than that?