China is going all out for automation. The country has become the world’s leading buyer of industrial robots – and is increasingly manufacturing them at home. The government shares and actively pursues its vision of ‘Replacing Humans with Robots’ with mega-corporations, as it seeks to squeeze out low-end industries (plastics, toys, furniture, garments and the like), while offering subsidies and bank loans to higher value industries like electronics, automobiles, infotech and biotech.
The national programme ‘Made in China 2025’ plans to transform the ‘world factory’ into a strategic base of ‘intelligent’ manufacturing. Productivity per worker must rise – which often translates as fewer jobs in industry. In the city of Dongguan, which has a $30-million annual fund to boost firms’ productivity, 87,000 workers were replaced by robots between 2014 and 2016. In Zhejiang province, two million lost their jobs between 2013 and 2015.1
