IBL News | New York
AI and robots are already remaking the Chinese economy, trying to limit the need for human intervention.
The goal of the Communist Party leaders continues to be to maintain its dominance as the world’s factory floor to sustain its exports, overcoming today’s challenge of rising costs at home and tariffs abroad.
AI offers a lifeline to head off those risks by helping China make and ship more stuff faster, cheaper, and with fewer workers, The Wall Street Journal reports.
And China wants to deploy what is available today quicker than the U.S. can, locking in any advantages. However, U.S. companies, such as Amazon.com and Walmart, are prioritizing automation in similar ways to Chinese firms.
According to the International Federation of Robotics, China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, nearly nine times as many as the U.S. and more than the rest of the world combined. The number of operational robots surpassed two million in 2024, the most of any country.
One risk is that AI could destroy more factory jobs than China expects, leaving it with too many unemployed workers. However, Chinese leaders are betting that the country’s shrinking population, projected to fall by 200 million over the next three decades, will offset job cuts in factories, boosting productivity without raising unemployment.
Today, China’s average factory wages are far higher than in countries such as India.