Heh, the last bit - that the Chinese part is a later modification I think I could have told you myself. I wouldn't be too surprised if there's a pre-WW2 variant of some sort. But I doubt it's actually a 'quote' with an origin you can pinpoint any better than many such aphorisms like 'we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us'.

Googling the last bit took me to a reddit post in a socialism subreddit that questioned whether people actually said that so there's that sidemusement as well.