SOME TWO THOUSAND WORKERS CLASHED WITH POLICE in China on Tuesday during a staged walkout at a factory near Shanghai in Kunshan City, Jiangsu province. According to reports from Hong Kong, about 50 people were injured in the clash. It occurred amid a recent spate of labor incidents, including a series of worker suicides at the Foxconn electronics factory and strikes at Honda factories and several other factories in Guangdong province. Recent labor problems have resulted in companies offering wage increases to appease workers. Foxconn has raised wages several times, most recently claiming to offer workers a 70 percent raise amid a public firestorm over the unsettling suicides at its plant that drew negative attention to major Western brands like Apple and Dell, who rely on Foxconn for parts. Honda raised wages only to see strikes emerge at one of its subsidiary's factories. Elsewhere, failed negotiations over wages or unfulfilled promises of wage hikes have triggered walkouts. Most of the targeted companies have been foreign, mainly Taiwanese and Japanese, with one South Korea-affiliated factory. American company KFC agreed quietly during a round of negotiations to pay more to employees in China. China is in the midst of an internal struggle to manage the rapid transformation of its economy and society. Few, when they look, can doubt that the struggle is one of consequence. The problem is that not many are looking. The recent labor issues raise serious questions about where China is going, and whether it will get there. The answers to these questions have a definite bearing on the global economy. Beijing knows its lease has run out on rapid export-driven growth spurred by strong global demand. Across the world, stimulus programs are fading, and the debt hangover is setting in. Europe's economies have become bogged down in unemployment, a weakening currency and painful attempts by many governments to correct their books. The inevitable result of this is less promise for the future consumption of Chinese goods. The United States' prospects for growth are far better, but Americans' consumer patterns have mellowed out, and Washington has fiscal problems of its own and is growing more mercantilist and more protectionist in the face of prolonged unemployment. None of these scenarios bode well for China's manufacturing sector even if it had not spent almost 30 years experiencing unbridled expansion. The reality is that in the near term China will face lower external demand and slower growth rates, and not merely as a theoretical eventuality that can be noted and then blithely ignored. The only hope for Beijing is to expedite the process of building its consumer base at home to generate new demand to keep Chinese workers busy and factories humming as foreign demand shrinks. One way to start restructuring a country as massive and diverse as China is to increase wages and household incomes, as Beijing has done by having local governments raise their required minimum wages. The more cash people have to spend and invest and boost the economy, the less likely they will be to take to the streets. Simple enough. Beijing knows its lease has run out on rapid export-driven growth spurred by strong global demand. Except that higher wages directly contravene the factor that made China an economic powerhouse in the first place: its massive pool of cheap labor. China's manufacturers have already reached the point of saturating foreign markets and can no longer substantially increase their profits by increasing the bulk of production. In response they have pared down their costs, competing with each other to see who can run on thinner margins. This process too has nearly reached its end, with further margin-cutting starting to look fatal. If labor costs rise too high, a number of these companies will be forced to shed workers or shut down, and foreign investors may look elsewhere for cheap labor. Nevertheless, this is the transition that China knows it must make. The survivors will be leaner and meaner and, ideally, the entire manufacturing sector will become more sophisticated and innovative. At the same time, new growth in other sectors will absorb the labor. The state will be there to catch those who fall through the cracks, economic restructuring will progress and China will shift away from export dependency and maintain growth at lower yet more sustainable rates. Yet China's ruling party fears it cannot handle the transition successfully, which explains its anxious attempts to manage the process as carefully and as gradually as possible. This entails using everything in its power to alleviate or suppress internal pressures and limit external interference and disturbances. The survival of the regime, not to mention the unity of the country, is at stake. Needless to say, the rest of the world also fears a failed transition for China. China's economy is currently the third largest in the world and much more deeply embedded into the global system than before, with a vast network of nations dependent on it in some way. While China could continue for a considerable period of time using fiscal spending and government direction to maintain its momentum and prop itself up (as it has done through the recent global crisis), a serious slowdown would have extremely negative consequences globally. Reduced demand would send commodity prices falling and knock commodities producers off their feet in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Central and Southeast Asia and Australia. Supply chains linked into China's manufacturing and assembly lines would collapse or be severely disrupted, harming China's suppliers and leaving customers — from neighboring Japan and Korea to the United States and Europe — with shortages of goods integral to their own economies. Countries heavily invested in China would scramble to save what assets they could, and global financial markets would be in turmoil (not least because of American-Chinese financial interdependence). Opportunities would emerge for economic rivals to take advantage, developing countries would seek to fill the economic void and developed countries would try to take advantage of their various resources. China's neighbors and the United States would see opportunities to strengthen their strategic position in China's periphery. In other words, trying to imagine what a failed transition would look like for the Chinese economy evokes memories of past failed attempts at social and economic transformation in China, all of which were catastrophic. The difference this time would be that the ramifications would extend further. The possibility alone, however far it may be from materializing in the near term (and STRATFOR suspects it is not as far off as conventional wisdom holds), has been enough to inject even more fear and uncertainty into the world economic system as China initiates new efforts to cool down its surging economy and reshape it for the future.