Crouched around a whirring machine on the upper floor of Zongwei’s factory in Suzhou, a group of engineers puts China’s next generation of manufacturing equipment through its paces. The research and development team is one of many across China racing to solve one of the biggest challenges facing its 6mn manufacturers: how to remain competitive as labour costs rise due to a shrinking working-age population. Zongwei builds automated factory lines, which, unlike their mechanical predecessors that move an assembly line at a constant speed, whisk the product around at different speeds and directions between workstations along a maglev conveyor system. It claims to drastically reduce manufacturing times and counts China Tobacco, electric vehicle maker BYD, and Apple suppliers Foxconn and Luxshare among its clients.
More significantly, Zongwei is developing a technology that clearly falls into the category of “smart manufacturing”, which also encompasses the use of robots that are displacing human labour. Beijing has so far embraced what it calls the “robot revolution” as a way to tackle rising labour shortages in its rapidly ageing population, offering the sector tax breaks and subsidies to encourage investment and procurement. Its success, however, will still depend on the human factor — specifically, on whether the remaining workforce will have the skills to handle these sophisticated machines.

Full report : How the ‘Robot revolution’ in China could create an employment crisis.