Why China won’t own next-generation manufacturing
China&#x27;s &quot;manufacturing engine&quot; has not &quot;largely stalled&quot;. Here&#x27;s China&#x27;s GDP growth.[1]  6.7% annually this year, down from 7.9% in 2023.  The US is 2.2%. China is not &quot;stalled&quot;.  If you want numbers that can&#x27;t be faked, inbound container counts at the port of Los Angeles are up.<p>The claim that &quot;75 percent of all robots used in China are purchased from foreign firms&quot; only makes sense if you count Hon Hai&#x2F;Foxconn as &quot;foreign&quot;.  HQ is in Taiwan, but Foxconn has over a million employees in China. Their Foxbot robots [2] are being produced at a rate of 20,000 per year. The US only has 26,000 robots total, mostly in automotive.[3] Foxconn claims they have good enough robotic precision now to use their robots to make iPhones.<p>The article is really a rehash of a paper by Dieter Ernst.[4] The &quot;manufacturing decline&quot; in China reflects layoffs in mining and metals. Those are both industries where even basic mechanization cuts the number of employees enormously. Those industries were mostly state-owned, and were oversized and overstaffed for the demand.  About a third of China&#x27;s state-run firm jobs (30 million) disappeared between 1998 and 2015. Ernst writes &quot;Outside of mines and minerals, manufacturing apparently continues to act as an employment absorber.&quot; That&#x27;s not manufacturing decline; that&#x27;s modernizing the steel industry.  (More high-quality stuff, less rebar, fewer workers, less pollution.)<p>Ernst complains that the 13th Five Year Plan isn&#x27;t specific about how new jobs will be created.  He points out that salaries for college graduates seem to be declining, and unemployment rates for college graduates are up. This matches US experience. There&#x27;s the usual complaint about not enough pre-trained vocational workers. However, companies in China are used to having to train their people - after all, many are right off the farm.<p>The article has a picture of &quot;carbon fiber silk thread&quot;. There is no such thing. There is, however, a stock image from Getty Images miscaptioned that way.<p>It&#x27;s a typical Vivek Wadhwa article, written to get attention.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;china&#x2F;gdp-growth-annual" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;china&#x2F;gdp-growth-annual</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scmp.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;article&#x2F;1829834&#x2F;foxconns-foxbot-army-close-hitting-chinese-market-track-meet-30-cent" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scmp.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;article&#x2F;1829834&#x2F;foxconns...</a>
[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifr.org&#x2F;industrial-robots&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifr.org&#x2F;industrial-robots&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;</a>
[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=2820433" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=2820433</a>