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I have thought that for a long time, too. It's natural that, on a global scale, developed-economy wages would appear to "stagnate" if developing-economy wages are increasing while competing for the same jobs.

Hmm. If the ngram "Chinese manufacturing" started exploding in books in the mid 80's we can assume the phenomenon started exploding a few years before that.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Chinese+manufa...

Early 1970s. Nixon visited China in 1972. Don't forget that China had to industrialize first - it was initially importing equipment from the US. Imports into the US at the time were more likely to come from Japan, Taiwan and Korea. Seems a to be a bit too late to explain the timeline, but it could be a factor - OTOH, given that China's workforce is no longer expanding then your theory would predict that wages will now stop stagnating but that does not seem to be the case?