http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8602786...
For it to be more economical to build a bridge over in China, stick it on a boat, and then drop it in place 1000 miles from where it was originally made is telling of where the construction industry is headed.
A few years ago, I was working doing some of the engineering for a major alumina refinery upgrade in Australia. One of the major parts of an alumina refinery is what's called a calciner, which heats the produced alumina to drive off the chemically-bound water from the product. They're complex piece of plant with large ducts, blowers and cyclones all laid out with insulating material to protect against the high temperatures and erosive nature of the alumina.
We built our calciners in Thailand as entire modules - not merely the size of a bridge, but the size of a 6-story building, complete with all equipment, structure and wiring in place, and then shipped them to the refinery site in Australia. The largest of the modules was 1800+ tons.
Ah, found a picture: Here's one of our calciners about to be offloaded from the MV Sea Baron. The crawler crane at the very right of the picture gives a sense of scale.
The Øresund (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge) was built Lego style in Spain, shipped piecewise and assembled on site.
In Portland, ME, where I grew up there used to be this huge blue drydock in the harbor. Occasionally I would see whole Burke class destroyers[1] lifted up out of the water in it. The end of the Cold War meant that the navy was downsizing, though, and eventually it was decided that there were better uses for the place. It was sold to a city in Croatia, and they somehow put floats underneath and just sailed the whole thing across the Atlantic. Then they built a few oil rigs where it used to be, and sailed those down to Venezuela.
All this shipping of buildings back and forth...this clearly needs disruption!
I'm not sure I get your point.
However, our current spate of unemployment isn't due to China - otherwise things wouldn't have suddenly gone to hell in '08 but would have gotten slowly worse as China industrialized. The decline in real wages in the US might be due to competition for natural resources from China and India and Africa and South America, but generally I'm not going to complain about things going well in countries much poorer than my own.
Net result: global average wages settle somewhere near what a Pakistani brickmaker would call "prosperity". What you're describing isn't a win.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+beijing+t...
And as far as putting it on a boat, sailing it across the pacific, through panama, and up the atlantic - or dropping it off in Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, or Mexico and putting it on a train... well you do the math :)
Either way, that's a lot of diesel.