As Donald Trump's trade war brings new levels of uncertainty to American manufacturing sector, one issue seems to have been vastly overlooked: China's massive legion of robot workers.
New reporting by the New York Times on Chinese robotics is shedding light on the enormous scale of automation happening across the Pacific. The article highlights the fact that China is currently one of the most automated countries in the world, with more capacity than the US, Germany, or even Japan — and more robots per worker than any other country besides South Korea and Singapore.
Automation on such a massive scale enables Chinese factories to pump out consumer and industrial goods at ever-decreasing costs, while fine-tuning product quality.
The US, by comparison, is quickly falling behind in robotics. In the past years, American manufacturing has shifted from consumer and industrial goods to high-tech products like airplanes, medical devices, and advanced machinery. These gigs call for highly specialized skills that can't easily be turned over to robot underlings — at least, not without dramatically shifting our robotics industry away from pie-in-the-sky startups to practical manufacturing efforts.
As it turns out, that's exactly what China did to become the robo-mecca, starting in 2015 with a national strategy called "