China has an ‘ambitious industrial plan that aims to break China’s reliance on foreign technology and pull its hi-tech industries up to Western levels’. The South China Morning Post reports that under the Chinese government’s “Made in China 2025” industrial master plan, the number of industrial automatons operating in the country would expand tenfold to 1.8 million units by 2025, when up to
70 percent of the robots used in China would be made in the country, from half in 2020, and 30 percent now.
Despite the country’s huge manufacturing industry, it lags behind South Korea, Singapore, Germany and Japan in its robots-to-human ratio with just 68 robots per 10,000 industrial workers compared to the other four’s 631, 488, 309 and 303 respectively. That’s a huge gap. But China’s workers are ageing and the blue collar pool is shrinking as it becomes easier and more acceptable for the children of these workers to get a university education and not struggle along in manual labour like their parents who had no or little choice. The 2025 deadline is just six years away – it will be an interesting watch.