[Mao_Zedang]

There will be a point in time where reshoring (landing the manufacturing back in the country where goods are sold) becomes viable because human labor wont be used. If China hasnt grown its economy big enough to be a consumer of its own products to maintain employment for its citizens things will get ugly (USSR?). It will be interesting to see how their economy based on being the manufacturing hub of the world survives.

[com2kid]

Chinese factories are already highly automated, indeed China has invested a lot into automation, much more so than the US has. The technical talent for automation lives in China, thanks to the Chinese government taking a long term view of research and development.

On top of that, the infrastructure for manufacturing exists in China.

To give an example:

You have a factory that makes a complex device. In theory, that factory can be brought over to the US just fine, and ran with US employees at a very comparable cost. (Trained technicians in China are not as cheap as you may thing!)

But, let's say you use an adhesive. Well that adhesive is sourced from China. And the glue machine used to apply the adhesive is also made in China. If you run out of glue, or a batch goes bad, or you need to reformulate it for some reason (which is going to happen a lot during pre-production in the very least!), then you have to go back and forth with the Chinese manufacturer of your adhesive, which may include flying personnel out, getting multiple batches of new adhesive formulas through customs, and so on and so forth.

In comparison, if your main factory is located in China, then the adhesive factory is right down the road.

The infrastructure argument is the same as for why startups happen in Silicon Valley, at first glance the location may not be optimal, but all the surrounding services smooth out all the details.

[jwhitlark]

The US has 72% of the manufacturing output of China, while having a factory workforce that is only 17% of the Chinese one. This doesn't square with your first assertions. US Manufacturing also spends far more on manufacturing R&D than any other country.

Sources: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf http://www.bls.gov/fls/china.htm

[kuschku]

Actually, a lot of manufacturing is moved back to Germany now, Adidas for example is moving all of their back.

And Foxconn buys all their automation technology in Germany ;)

[nxzero]

Might be wrong, but my understanding is that China currently leads the world in robotic labor; meaning all robotic labor preformed by robots own by Chinese companies regardless of where the robots are.

[Mao_Zedang]

True or Not, it makes no difference, given the choice between a robotic product made in china delivered in two weeks and a robotic product made in the USA delivered in 24 hours, consumers will always pick the later. And given this example why would the cost be any different to the consumer? If anything you would expect the Chinese example to have higher shipping costs. When talking about a truly competitive global economy which we do not really have no because of wildly different costs of labor. A robot in the US costs just as much to run as in China.

[krona]

There may well be more robots in China than anywhere else in the world, but they don't manufacture most of them.

Most articulated robots are manufactured in (unsurprisingly) Germany, Japan and South Korea.

[toomuchtodo]

If robots can be put anywhere, you put them where your customers are.

[rustyfe]

Where your customers are, insofar as there is capital and labor (even robotic factories break down) there to support it. That might mean onshoring for Americans, but I don't think that's true everywhere.

Look at how China is investing in Africa. In this hypothetical future, I can still see a country with large amounts of robotic equipment, lots of people educated to operate and program them, and good shipping infrastructure dominating global trade.

It will just be a highly developed China shipping to developing nations, instead of a developing China shipping to developed nations.

You can plug in your choice of robotic manufacturing country for China if you'd like, the point stands, but I see China as well positioned to maintain their lead in manufacturing if they are very smart.