- 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.
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.