Chinese industry is not known for caring overly much about the long term effects on the bodies of their workers. They have more.
And yes, I find it scary to think of what the world is competing with in China. It is hard to compete with their brutal workforce ethics (or lack thereof) and as they seem to be getting well on top of technology too the future is theirs it seems.
Chinese working hours are mostly long to balance out low productivity. This worked for Japan until it did not; Japanese growth stalled until Japanese workers were poorer than Taiwanese or South Koreans by some measures. And China is racing fastest towards demographic collapse, particularly in its largest, most productive cities by. People 60 and older make up 37% of the population in Shanghai, and there the TFR is 0.6.
(Yes, yes, there's vapor-ware, and useless products, and certainly "fake jobs". Those existed in the '40s, too, and in any other time period or economy you care to look at.)
In my view, the problem is that white collar workers stopped thinking of themselves as Workers. Any of us who rely on a company for a paycheck (and, perniciously, in the US for health insurance) aren't Capital, even if we make high salaries. Maybe we're aspiring to join that class - we'll hit the startup lottery, or FIRE, or our IRA portfolio will go up forever - but we ain't yet. (That's fine, by the way: I'm using Marxist terms, but I'm not a Marxist. Pursuing financial independence, and the real - even if remote - possibility of attaining it is what's made the US such a dynamic economy.)
However, allowing our aspirations for wealth, or the relative comfort of white-collar jobs, to lead us to identify with the political goals of Capital - or worse, to adopt an elitist attitude towards people who work in what you call the "real economy" - is what's got the US into the mess we're currently in. That's the "genius" you identify in the present system, and the origin of the cruelty within it.
In reality, we're all Working Class (well, 99% of us are - although that proportion is way out of whack on this board, of all places!), and we need to (politically) act like it.
However, I don't think you can ignore politics! "Changing what's in your heart", does diddly if you're, say, working in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. It took a +century of dedicated labor activism and political effort to get to a point where any workers at all could dream of breaking free, and in the US we've arguably backslid in recent decades. Continued political action and worker solidarity are desperately needed.
I live my life palms down, not palms up.
I think there are more valuable things you can give people than money. I like to enrich others by writing open source code and blogging about it. It's scalable. It doesn't make me poorer. It provides others with entertainment, useful tools, and most importantly knowledge.
Giving money to the desperate offers a bad return on investment for society. Money is better given to people who are having the most impact enriching society.
Voting is about as impactful as praying.
Every altruistic person has a responsibility to look after their self-interests first. Since if you're not strong and healthy, then you won't be capable of giving to others.
Finally, you don't owe anyone anything. The moment people expect you to give, it stops being a gift.
I do agree with you about that. In the context of labor law (where this discussion started), the most important - a 40-hour work-week, overtime, minimum wage, worker-safety protections, the right to unionize, federal holidays - don't directly redistribute money, but they make life better for everyone. Public education, state-funded universities and health-care systems: same. Public roads and bridges. Research institutions. I will vote to raise my own taxes to support all of those things. More directly, I am a YIMBY (google it, if you're not familiar with the term), even if it hurts my home's value.
Like you say, you and I have very different moral frameworks. Yours is certainly ascendant in the US right now. I don't think it's going to go well, but let's check back in a few years and see if either of us have changed our minds?