China has long been the posterboy for amazing development statistics and here we go again..... China installed almost 300 000 robots in factories in 2024, which is more than the whole world combined.
Compare this to the US, which managed just 34,200, just over 1/0th of China's impressive output.
And more than half of China's robots were domestically manufactured, marking the country's shift away from reliance on imported Japanese and European models and toward full-scale self-reliance.
This industrial wave has been driven by a constellation of companies that most Westerners are already well familar with such as BYD and Huawei, which are supplemented by hundreds of AI and robotics startups clustered around Hangzhou and Shenzhen.
All together, they're building the infrastructure of a new manufacturing age: one where machines build machines, and human labour becomes optional.
Factories Without Workers
China's factories are increasingly 'dark' - there are more that operates entirely without human light or supervision-is no longer a concept sketch. Chinese firms started deploying fully automated production lines that can function in complete darkness, using AI-driven robots to handle tasks ranging from micro-assembly to logistics.
Analysts at Citi GPS have even forecast that the world could have as many as 600 million human-like bots by 2050, with China making a sizeable chunk of them. That is not just a leap in productivity but a complete redefinition of what manufacturing is. In such a model, labour costs and safety rules, even the working day itself, start to lose relevance.
The Race for Technological Supremacy
If China can marry sophisticated AI with mass-market, inexpensive robotics, it is going to be an even more formidable global economic force. The country already leads in electric vehicles, batteries, and consumer drones, and there's probably more to come!
The robot age is no longer a theoretical possibility. The question now is not whether factories could function without people, but who will own and control the systems that do. China's strategy of scaling automation as a matter of national policy means that its lead could soon become unassailable.
This should be a wake-up call for the West: for innovation to make any difference, it has to be implemented. The world's next great industrial revolution is already underway — and it may be led, once again, from the workshops of Asia.
China is the world's factory. Europe and the US just can't compete with their scale. I just wonder what their own employment rate will be like if they replace all the workers with robots.
That's an interesting point to think about, how worse off/ better off are the unemployed in China? How are they going to fare during this transition? Does China care more the average poor person than the USA for exmample? I know next to nothing about current social development in CHina!
I think it's just a matter of time before they export their robots/automation systems to the rest of the world as they did with prior techs. Will be interesting to see how they will adopt or not of these systems, I feel that the resistance will be mild, apart from the West, of course.