- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
Robotics has catapulted Beijing into a dominant position in many industries
“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Ford’s chief executive about his recent trip to China.
“Their cost and the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Farley warned in July.
Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire behind mining giant Fortescue – which is investing massively in green energy – says his trips to China convinced him to abandon his company’s attempts to manufacture electric vehicle powertrains in-house.
Other executives describe vast, “dark factories” where robots do so much of the work alone that there is no need to even leave the lights on for humans.
“We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobile phones,” recalls Greg Jackson, the boss of British energy supplier Octopus.
In Britain, Shenzhen-based BYD multiplied its September sales by a factor of 10 this year – overtaking far more established brands such as Mini, Renault and Land Rover.
A few weeks ago there was a report on some US VC investors who made a similar trip to China and were then ‘terrified’ … Now this. Is it somewhat similar to the influencer trips to Xinjiang that then tell the world that the genocide of Uyghurs is not true?
How much do you see in such PR trips? Go a bit upstream the value chain to get the full picture …
Addition:
Here is practically the same article, posted less than three weeks ago. It’s the same narrative, posted by the same user.
https://feddit.org/post/19329883
If I understand your numerous posts on China correctly I assume you see her mostly as an adversary in terms of security and therefore economy too. I imagine you care very much about sovereignty. European, German, Western, something. And I assume you probably see industry as the weapon of choice to fight back.
If that’s the case, then I guess you’ll soon be advocating for sending European workers to these nickel mines, probably protected by some military force.
Tbh one country should go in a conquering spree across the world to finally unify humanity, or at least those who are left after the war
On the other hand, are europe and the US of A better at sourcing their supply chain?
I mean terms like terrified are bonkers and sound like PR wank, but China aggressively follows an embrace extend extinguish strategy. Currently, they are in embrace and extend phase, we might want to brace for impact, idk?
In a nutshell: The Chinese government is aware (and afraid) of Western “de-coupling” or “de-risking”, whatever you’d like to call it. At the same time, China has massive overcapacity in practically all industries, while domestic consumption has been stalling for a long time and shows no sign of revival.
These visits and the articles are part of a propaganda campaign to (falsely) tell the world that China is too far ahead, they can’t be beaten, don’t even try. This, of course, is rubbish.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-industrial-robots-installed
This is in the making for some time.
Domestic consumption can be fixed by paying higher wages. They must keep consumption artificially low to reduce external dependency.
Does de-coupling stand a chance? Unless there is a naval blockade, they can offer better and cheaper products to every non-western country. What’s the role of the West in this world?
You don’t understand, this is just PR propaganda. The robots are just aimlessly moving around for show. Meanwhile there’s slave labour under the floor doing the work.
/s
I don’t think anyone in the West is taking decoupling seriousy. After all that would hurt profits and our owner class isn’t having it. Of course it would be a good idea to rebuild domestic manufacturing but that would take more than a decade since we need to build the education, workforce, supply chains and final manufacturing. And that won’t happen without a drastic shift in power away from the owner class, because that isn’t in its interest.
Uhh, that’s a spicy background, isn’t it? Thanks