Well, capitalism definitely has a role, but it’s not exactly a coincidence that China started out with cheap labor (and maintained it so). A country that manipulates its currency for specifically for export reasons is definitely also to blame. (Before you say but US also manipulates currency, the levels of currency manipulation are not comparable: if they were, BRICs would be our world reserve currency)
Anyways, new places don’t go to China for labor, they go for overall manufacturing costs.
All that said, from my (somewhat limited) experience Chinese manufacturing is sort of a niche. If you’re willing to invest all the resources into NRE and QC and not afraid of corporate espionage of your manufactured product, you can definitely save a lot of money (China really isn’t all that good for prototype or small batch manufacturing if you need a made-to-order part/product as the headache from language barrier and quality issues are greater than the cost savings). Apple clearly makes it work because they don’t care if you copy their PCBs - good luck copying their custom-designed ICs.
I hate Apple as it’s an anti-competitive walled-garden monopolistic closed-standard anti-repair evil trillion dollar corporation, but this isn’t true. Modern iPhones have closed the gap significantly in hardware specs (display, processor, optics, IPXX rating, and now thanks to EU even USB-C) and they’ve always been better for general use in software. That, added with the fact that flagship Android manufacturers have learned how to play the pricing games of Apple, means that Apple’s price to performance ratio is pretty competitive with Android phones these days.
Their main products are pretty good these days, as much as I hate to admit it. I’ve never even owned an Apple device, and won’t as long as I can.