Some machines may have been moved, but a huge part of China’s role as a new market was that it was a market for new industrial capital, just as Japan had been earlier. In fact the greatest pressures towards shifting industry to China was not the cheaper labor but the combined factors of aging industrial capital in the US vs more modern industrial capital being sold to China (and China had the same issue internally where it wound up with its own rust belts as the old industrial centers dating all the way back to the Japanese colonialization of Manchuria were abandoned or scrapped in favor of newer bases of industry) and the sheer room for growth that China’s large labor base provided.

That is to say, while the labor was cheaper it was the fact that businesses could expand rapidly and to an extent that they could not in the US while making use of more modern machines that really drove the shift, although it also has to be said that the US didn’t exactly deindustrialize either, because it also had a market for modern capital, but rather stagnated and saw a reduction in industrial labor even as industrial production continued to rise. Although it has to be mentioned that how the overall industrial supply chain wound up organized does inevitably involve China most of the time now and the two economies are heavily integrated with western industries relying on China as a supplier, buyer, or intermediary step in the production chain, to such an extent that I’ve seen the unironic argument made by ultraleft accelerationists that if China were to collapse than the US and Europe would surely follow and so they stated the destruction of China as their immediate goal (clearly that’s sociopathic detachment resulting from living in a world of pure ideology, even if their economic analysis is otherwise on point; I would argue the failing of that view is its complete and utter disregard for the lives and wellbeing of billions of people rather than not seeing potential cause and effect correctly).