SHENZHEN - China: Hundreds of workers here at a huge factory owned by the Japanese company Hitachi are fashioning plates of glass and aluminum into shiny computer disks, wrapping them in foil. The products are destined for the United States, where they will arrive like billions of other items, labeled "Made in China."

But often these days, "Made in China" is actually "Made by Someone Else" - by multinational companies from Japan, South Korea and the United States that are using China as the final assembly station in their vast global production networks.

Analysts say this evolving global supply chain - which often tags goods at their final assembly stop - is increasingly out of step with global trade figures, which serve to inflate China into a bigger trade threat than it may actually be.

That kind of distortion is likely to appear once again on Friday, when the U.S. Commerce Department is expected to announce that America's trade deficit with China swelled to a record $200 billion last year.

It may look as though China is getting the big payoff, but over all, the biggest winners are consumers in the United States and other rich countries, who have benefited enormously from China's production of cheaper toys, clothing, electronics and other goods.

At the same time, U.S. multinationals and other foreign companies, including retailers, are big winners, because they are the largely invisible hands behind the factories pumping out inexpensive goods from China. And they are reaping the bulk of the profit from the trade.

"Basically, in the 1990s, foreign firms based in America, Europe, Japan and the rest of Asia moved their manufacturing operations to China," said Yasheng Huang, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But the controls and therefore profits of these operations firmly rest with foreign firms. While China gets the wage benefits of globalization, it does not get to keep the profits of globalization."

To the extent that there are any real losers, they are mostly lower-wage workers elsewhere, like the ones at Hitachi, who lost their jobs in Japan, along with workers in other parts of Asia and in the United States who suffered as employers began relocating factories to China. Indeed, despite the big shift to China, U.S. imports from Asia as a whole have hardly changed in the last 15 years.

Factories in Taiwan used to assemble the world's computers; now Chinese mainland does. Hong Kong garment workers used to stitch tons of fabric into finished clothing; now Chinese workers do. And Japanese plants once manufactured the world's most popular consumer electronics brands, like Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba; now many of them are shipped from Chinese ports.

In fact, about 60 percent of China's exports are controlled by foreign-financed companies, according to the latest Chinese customs data. In categories like computer parts and consumer electronics, foreign companies command an even greater share of control over the exports, analysts say.

Foreign expertise has been critical as manufacturing supply chains become increasingly complex, involving multiple countries that separately produce individual components that are then shipped to China for final assembly. Since such a system can render global trade statistics misleading; some experts say that a more apt label would be "Assembled in China."

Because so many different people in different places touch a particular product, other experts say you might as well just throw away the trade figures.

"In a globalized world, bilateral trade figures are irrelevant," said Dong Tao, an economist at UBS. "The trade balance between the U.S. and China is as irrelevant as the trade balance between New York and Minnesota."

China's supply of cheap labor, coupled with a deliberately undervalued currency, helped bring about $465 billion in foreign direct investment into China from 1995 to 2004, making the country one of the hottest destinations in the world for foreign capital.

In the electronics industry, relocations to China mainland have soared. A decade ago, Taiwan controlled the computer components market and relied on domestic manufacturing. Now, Taiwanese companies produce 80 percent of the world's motherboards, 72 percent of all notebook computers and 68 percent of liquid crystal display monitors. And most of the assembly takes place in Chinese mainland.

"Everyone has moved to China," said Tony Yang, an executive at AOpen, a subsidiary of Acer, a huge computer and electronics company in Taiwan. "Our suppliers, our buyers, their main production facilities have all been relocated. Wages in Taiwan are just too high."

Japanese and South Korean companies are also coming to China in force. Panasonic of Japan now has 70,000 employees working in China; Toshiba's largest information technology production site in the world is in the Chinese coastal city of Hangzhou. And Samsung, the South Korean company, has 23 factories, 50,000 employees and all of its notebook PC production in China. Its last computer notebook factory in South Korea closed last year.

The migration has left footprints in trade statistics. In 1990, Japan was America's dominant trading partner in the Pacific, and Asia accounted for 38 percent of all U.S. imports.

Last year, however, China was Asia's dominant trading power. The country's trade with the United States has soared about 1,200 percent since 1990. And yet Asia's share of imports into the United States has held remarkably steady, at 38 percent. In other words, if production labels simply read "Made in Asia," almost nothing changed from 1990 to 2005, except that many goods got a lot cheaper as China took on a greater role as the world's factory floor.

Even as that shift was taking place, most Asian countries retained and even expanded their powerful influence in the global supply chain, designing increasingly sophisticated models, making the preassembly components, and carrying out the marketing and brand management. So, while China now has an estimated $200 billion trade surplus with the United States, it also has a $137 billion trade deficit with the rest of Asia.

"I don't think the developed world shifted that much work to Asia," said Vincent Chan of Credit Suisse. "The places that have seen the most manufacturing disappear are Hong Kong and Taiwan."

To be sure, American and European companies are moving more of their manufacturing to China. Dell and IBM computers used to be primarily made in the United States. Now, most of their PCs are assembled in China.

Bigger multinationals could be on the way. Airbus is now considering building passenger jets in China. And General Motors is considering exporting some of the cars it makes in China.

Thousands of Chinese factories have created millions of jobs for the country's low-wage migrant laborers, who earn about 75 cents an hour. But so far, Chinese companies in these industries have not been able to climb from basic manufacturing into design work and beyond. China's rise is in striking contrast to that of Japan in the 1980s, when Japan was producing brands like Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi and Sony. China, by contrast, has few if any global brands beyond Lenovo and Haier, which are still struggling to build name recognition.

"The biggest beneficiary of all this is the United States," said Tao, the UBS economist. "Look, a Barbie doll costs $20 but China only gets about 35 cents of that."

Chinese officials rarely miss an opportunity to argue that the trade statistics showing huge surpluses for China are misleading indicators of the country's prosperity.

"What China got in the past few years is only some pretty figures," said Mei Xinyu of the Ministry of Commerce Research Institute. "American and foreign companies have gotten the real profit."

Still, China's economy is booming, and an aggressive class of entrepreneurs is emerging at home that resembles the overseas Chinese who built business empires in exile during the 20th century. These are people like Yin Mingshan, a 68-year-old multimillionaire in the central city of Chongqing, who is fashioning himself as a Chinese Henry Ford.

"We are the biggest exporter of motorcycles in China," Yin said.

Yin started out selling books in the 1980s, then engines and motorcycles in the 1990s. Today, his company, Lifan Group, has just opened a huge factory. Yin says his next goal is to export cars to the United States.

Don Brasher, who operates Global Trade Information Services, said this about the Chinese transformation: "That's how the Japanese got started. Remember, in the 1950s, the Japanese started exporting motorcycles. And 20 years later, it was cars."