>Their people are still transitioning from agrarian hardship to urban factory life, and there seems to be a zeal that comes with this transition, a willingness to work hard for what here today would be considered little.
You don't find hordes of Chinese peasants in their dark factories.
Do you think that JLCPCB offer such prices because they have 2000000 lowly paid machinists drilling the pcb holes manually? China invests in all kinds of automation like crazy
There is huge difference indeed in transportation industry - China works their chineese drivers to the bone 18 hours a day, whereas Germany works eastern european drivers to the bone 18 hours a day.
While China is hardly a happy place and exploitation is rampant - there is less on the assembly floor - not because they care, but because even cheaper than exploiting people is not having to hire people at all. China installed in 2024 more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined and they seems to lead the innovation in home robots too.
We are at a fun point in history - for the first time the ability to automate seems to really outstrip the ability to create new jobs.
Of course they installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, most of the high volume factories are there.
I have nothing against the Chinese by the way, I just don’t think the fate of Europe should be so beholden to whatever they are doing with manufacturing. They are undercutting us in a way that hurts Europeans? Great, cut them off. Most Chinese products in the west are lower quality than what they replaced anyway.
The real answer is that the long period of Chinese outsourcing masked the inflationary impact of money supply expansion, which is super duper convenient for the people with power in the west. So this won’t happen absent some kind of revolution, or a recognition that the juice has been squeezed too much.
You don't find hordes of Chinese peasants in their dark factories.
Do you think that JLCPCB offer such prices because they have 2000000 lowly paid machinists drilling the pcb holes manually? China invests in all kinds of automation like crazy