The Telegraph reports that China is “intimidating” Western trade officials. Chinese “dark factories” are so completely automated that there is no need for lights on the assembly floor.
The CEO of Ford Motor Company said, “It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.” Jim Farley told the London newspaper“We are in global competition with China, and it’s not just [electric vehicles]And if we lose it, we have no future at Ford.”
China’s assault on global manufacturing is most evident in the passenger car sector. As Farley explained, China has taken a big lead on new energy vehicles. OneAn astonishing 62 percent of the world’s EVsThe ones delivered last month – the battery-only and hybrid models – were made in that country.
China can thank its robots for this. According to the Telegraph report, there were only 189,000 industrial robots in China in 2014. By last year, this number had reached 2,027,000.
In comparison, in America,There were only 394,000 robots installedAt the end of last year. Just over 34,000 were added in 2024.
China’s rampant automation is a strength, but it is also a response to the country’s most fundamental weakness: its impending demographic collapse.
Beijing said that at the end of last year the country’s population was 1.41 billion. Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has predicted this By 2100 it will reduce to 330 millionYi’s forecast is at the low end of the range, but others’ estimates have been falling over time, making his figure plausible.
Yi’s estimate assumes China will be able to stabilize its total fertility rate – typically, the average number of children each woman will have in her lifetime – at 0.8.China’s total fertility rate to be 1.0 in 2023And last year also it was the same. A country generally needs a total fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population.
However, Yi – who also believes that China’s official population numbers are already inflated – believes that China’s total fertility rate could fall to 0.7, meaning there could be fewer than 330 million people by 2100.
China’s working-age population, the 15–59 age group, peaked in 2011And will likely decline faster than the overall population.
“China has embarked on the path of no demographic return,”Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine writes,
“Left without addressing,” Yeestates usa“China’s demographic trap could lead to civilizational collapse.”
China’s central government has adopted a number of different tactics to increase fertility – for example, relaxing its strict one-child policy and adopting a two-child policy in 2016. When this did not work, the government moved to a three-child policy in 2021. Despite liberalisation, The country’s population was at its peak in 2021 And has been falling ever since.
as wangtells“No country has successfully increased fertility through government policies.” Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute told me: “It is possible to use bayonets and police power to reduce the birth rate against the will of the people; it is much more difficult to use state force to increase the birth rate,”
So China, which has failed to increase fertility, now needs a lot of robots. Ryan Whitton of Bismarck Analysis said China’s manufacturing sector has been “quite labor intensive.”told the telegraph“So in a preemptive fashion, they want to automate it as much as possible, not because they expect they’ll be able to get higher margins – that’s usually the idea in the West – but to compensate for this population decline and gain a competitive advantage.”
As Ford’s Farley suggests, China’s automation drive gives it a competitive advantage for now, but it’s also inspiring other countries to employ robots. And as all countries install the equipment, China’s labor-cost advantage, which drove the country’s growth for decades, will disappear.
Automation is equalizing labor costs around the world, which ultimately means companies that manufacture closer to the point of final consumption will dominate markets.
Meanwhile, China’s robots are creating another problem. Every robot installed means at least one less job for humans, and the country already has a problem of unemployment. Beijing reports that The overall urban unemployment rate was 5.3 percent in August,The rate for the 16 to 24 age group that month was 18.9 percent,
China has traditionally underestimated these figures. But whether they are accurate or not, China needs to put people to work, and the rapid installation of robots undermines this vital function. There are now a large number of youth in the country who have no prospects.
There are no chances young “lying flat“- are falling out of society – and others are “retiring”, leaving the cities to pursue farming in the countryside. Both trends add instability to an already unhappy population. Some young Chinese even say they are part of their country”last generation,
Beijing believes fewer people won’t necessarily derail economic growthBut robots are no solution to collapsing demographics – at least not in the long term.
Gordon G. chang is the author of ,Plan Red: China’s project to destroy America” And ,China’s imminent collapse,
