All this fits together. Personally, I've seen several cities in China, and they're booming. Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
As I understand it, most people in China are worse off than before, not better off. It is very easy to think everything is going great when you are presented with a couple of dozen megalopolises that have recently begun to make Hong Kong look like some kind of sleepy backwater. But it is important to realize that China is one of the most unequal nations on Earth now, and that although there is great wealth and spendour, there is also great suffering and degredation. China is a large place and there is plenty of room for equally impressive (or appalling) extremes.
Selling 140 M new mobile phones would, roughly, equal selling one phone to every three persons in the luckier 400 million of the population (discounting entirely the 800 million who are worried about eating rather than consumer electronics purchases). For people that are notably materialistic, indeed crassly so, this is actually a surprisingly low number, given a 'boom'.
Rising wages are a stock complaint of employers the world over, and particularly in markets where they've held the whip hand and paid pennies for as long as they can remember.
It is funny that we are beginning to see the construction bubbles in the West for what they are, but do not yet consider something similar may be happening in China.
