China's economy is becoming automated

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Source of this article: Global Times

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The Swiss "New Zurich Zeitung" article on August 29, the original title: More love machine than immigrants - China's economy is realizing intelligence, anyone entering China's Nanjing Iron and Steel Group factory is like entering a "time machine" : the "smart factory" connected to the 5G network is its heart. Anyone entering the vast hall could hear the constant roar of machines and the sound of drafts, but hardly any human speech.

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Because almost all production links are intelligent. Industrial robots load and pack steel. A conventional factory of this size would require 130 workers, but only 10 are needed here. They sit in front of LED monitors in the control room and track various parameters in real time.

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Such a situation would spark heated debates about unemployment in other countries, but China is proudly advertising that "all factory workers should become office workers". Nanjing Iron and Steel wants to reduce manual labor to save on labor costs.

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The biggest threat to China's economic rise is not a trade war with the United States or competition on the international political stage, but an aging population: fewer babies are being born. According to the latest census data, nearly 300 million people in China will be over 60 in the next five years. Beijing is trying to fix the problem from within. Demographers believe that China can improve productivity through better education, and that this can also be achieved through intelligence.

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China's ambitions can be seen in the industrial robot industry. As part of its five-year plan, Beijing aims to make manufacturing more intelligent. While global sales of industrial robots declined slightly last year, they rose 19 percent in China. According to the International Federation of Robotics, even before the outbreak, China installed more industrial robots than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Germany combined.

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Rapidly rising wage costs are also driving the development. At the same time, fewer and fewer people are physically working in cities and infrastructure, more than half of whom are over 40. Last year, the number of migrant workers in China fell for the first time.

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Despite rising wages, factories everywhere complain that they are increasingly struggling to fill physically demanding positions. That's why robots are everywhere in the service industry in China's eastern metropolises: robot baristas make coffee for customers, delivery robots serve food in hot pot restaurants, and robot hotel attendants provide room service. Tech companies are also investing heavily in autonomous driving, with a view to replacing taxi and bus drivers in the future. (Written by Fabian Kretschmer, translated by Aoki)
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