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.
Saw an investigative video about Shenzen, almost 10-years ago I think? Yeah. I was terrified. They have their shit together, have no concept of IP, steal whatever and compete amongst each other to innovate faster and better.
If you have a clever idea in electronics, and you got the education/experience, you can wander down to the market and buy almost any parts you wish, no matter how weird, right off the shelf. These guys were talking about building working prototypes within 24-hours.
Meanwhile, in America, we lost Radio Shack and Fry’s (which was only in big cities) and have to wait weeks to get a pack of LEDs off eBay. Imagine a mega mall where you can get any electronic widget you like, cheap.
Their culture, government, people, all were totally alien to my American senses, but it was clear they were fucking smart and moving fast. Looks like there are lots of new videos to check out, get me updated.
I was in Shanghai 15 years ago and I remember feeling the energy and optimism in the air. You could physically sense this spirit of “everything is possible” and also see it by looking at this huge modern megacity where 20 years before (at that time) has only been a small fisher village.
Until today, I am still perplexed by Chinas economy. It is supposed to be communism but it felt more capitalistic than the USA. Markets everywhere with seemingly no rules, pure competition.
Yeah, I don’t understand either (not that I should). It’s almost like their corruption moves the opposite way from ours. I’m used to US companies asking for presents and considerations and government supplying. I think it may work differently in China?
Maybe it’s just what growth/expansion phase of capitalism looks like and why it was so exciting for so many.
I also imagine we’re not seeing the whole picture. As we are only allowed government approved messaging.
Honestly, I can see the benefits of training and integrating the technology of Internet into their culture, before exposing the population to new ideas. Not that I think that’s the design, but it may end up being an unintentional consequence.
Edit:
I guess it’s sort of what happened when the US started building up the old bones of the internet, out companies had a defacto leg up.
If China keeps their Internet bubble, with it’s social structure and deep deep economic ties, then if you want access to the Chinese market, you’ll have to use their Internet and be subject to the government, probably utilizing their people to negotiate.
They’re not selling pickaxes to golf diggers, they already own the mine.
/Basically conjecture
Decades of offshoring all manufacturing led to manufacturing research being offshored instead of developing tech in the West.
You reap what you sow.
It’s just capitalism. They externalized costs in the form of human suffering and subsidized the rest, which let them dominate the market and advance their technology and (most importantly) skill to the point of surpassing most of the world. China sells a lot of crap only because that’s what the market demands; “chinesium” is a myth now: the truth is their capability for quality is just as high as their capability for quantity ever was, and it’s been that way for a little over a decade. Assuming the population problems don’t stress social issues too much, China is primed to be the next US.
It’s post reconstruction Japan all over again. Once mocked for making only cheap low quality products, and then feared by America to overtake them as the largest economy in the world before the economic bubble burst.
It’s one of the reasons cyberpunk as a genre has so much Japanese culture in it. In the 80s the US thought that the dollar would be replaced by the yen as the world’s currency and English would be replaced with Japanese as the language of trade. They thought that Americans would be eating their meals with chopsticks in a decade’s time as they were rendered culturally obsolete.
I was a kid in the 80s and remember the fear of Japan. Funny in retrospect, but it was real and it was pervasive at the time.
And now, now think Japan in the 80s but with the economic power and domestic market of China…
Telegraph
Yeah, the signal to noise ratio is worthless from that paper, on the subject of China’s comparative strength.
Per other sources, the picture is mixed, although China obviously has more growth potential in the long run, if they don’t ruin it.
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.
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?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-industrial-robots-installed
This is in the making for some time.
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.
I don’t think anyone in the West is taking decoupling seriousy
How else does our owner class want to survive China?
Of course it would be a good idea to rebuild domestic manufacturing but that would take more than a decade
Unless there is KI and robots
Uhh, that’s a spicy background, isn’t it? Thanks
Blessed be the AliExpress empire, with the dragon god Temu at its head
Congrats that gotta be the dumbest thing I read in the last … wait, with Trump in control it’s only a few hours.
Bow to the dragon emperor’s people
Couldn’t they put on the light in the “dark factories” to show the executive what is going? Just for a moment, I am sure they do have lights there for maintenance.
That would be like a magician explaining the trick, would lose the drama.
Maybe they were too terrified. /s
“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Ford’s chief executive about his recent trip to China.
Report from June 2025: ‘The Most Humbling Thing I’ve Ever Seen’: Ford CEO On China’s Car Industry’
