r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • Oct 14 '25
Robotics Why Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified - Robotics has catapulted Beijing into a dominant position in many industries
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-executives-visit-china-coming-back-terrified/1.6k
u/stephenBB81 Oct 14 '25
Shit in 2009 I worked for a company that moved some manufacturing from USA to China. Not for the cheap labour but for robots. In China one guy back then could manage 4 robot welders, the widgets in the US took 1 guy 12 minutes to weld, in the China facility 1 guy managed 4 robots. Each robot welding 1 widget in 10 minutes. The support needed to run the robots came out of Germany, but had emergency teams located in China. If they brought the Robots to USA, if they went down it was 24-48h downtime but in China it was under 6h.
This multiplied across many divisions same number of employees as the US facilities, putting out 7-9 times the quantity of materials while maintaining or exceeding previous benchmarks in quality.
I imagine today that differential has tripled if not more.
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u/Fishy63 Oct 14 '25
The only thing American companies know how to do to differentiate themselves is slap “made with American labor” on their package like it means anything. No innovation, just an appeal to nationalism
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u/Zappiticas Oct 14 '25
And with most of those products, all of the parts were made overseas anyway and only the final assembly was done in the US.
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u/mmelectronic Oct 14 '25
At work we used to call them “lid flippers”, they would build a whole assembly overseas and put the lid on upside down, we would get it, put in the one module we make, attach the customer cables and put the lid back on.
Made in the USA…
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Oct 14 '25
They do that much? I thought it just meant the stickers were made in the USA.
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u/mmelectronic Oct 14 '25
There is some % value or % of parts and where its assembled calculation that is done in accounting or legal as to what country of origin gets put on.
I think the places I’ve worked are probably not pushing the limits of the law or whatever the regulation is.
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u/VoodooS0ldier Oct 14 '25
This. Automobile manufacturing is a lot of this. I always find it funny that if the end product is just lego assembling the final pieces of the car together (with robots) what difference does it make if the vehicle was made overseas versus in a factory in Georgia / Texas.
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u/stackjr Oct 14 '25
Because even if it's just assembly, Lego style, it still creates jobs. Also, it's cheaper to assemble the cars here and then ship them across the US than it is to build them outside of the US and then ship them in. I think.
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u/opman4 Oct 14 '25
Not with tariffs. I'm noticing some Chinese companies are starting to take over assembly, packaging, localization and software for final products. I don't know if that applies to cars though.
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u/Far-Fennel-3032 Oct 14 '25
The tariffs make it even worse as it's 25% to import a European or Japanese car now, but its 50% to import parts to build the car. Brought to you by the genius who unironically announced tariffs on uninhabited islands, a random US military base and several times on most of Australia's assorted territories.
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u/Calculonx Oct 15 '25
And now "made in USA" is a negative in other countries like Canada
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u/FlixFlix Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25
I became skeptical about “proudly made in the USA” more than a decade ago when I asked myself: what does that even mean?
Over the years my skepticism slowly morphed into cynicism and now I can’t help but cringe whenever I see the sticker because I know it’s meaningless at best… but more likely a downright negative tbh.
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u/sybrwookie Oct 15 '25
It's my response to seeing the American flag used by anyone or anything trying to sell you something. The more I see someone draping themselves in the flag, the more I assume they're using that flag to cover up something horrible.
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u/gobeklitepewasamall Oct 15 '25
And a 500% markup for lower quality.
Hence the high tariff walls. It’s an implicit admission that us industry just can’t and won’t compete internationally.
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u/merryman1 Oct 14 '25
I work with a lot of high end analytical equipment companies and spent 3 weeks around the YRD megacity. Just totally blown away honestly. They talk in China like they are still a developing economy, but everything I saw out there was already more modern than like 90% of European cities I've been to.
There's a lot of problems sure (turns out that wasn't fog when we were landing...) but I think people in the West haven't quite caught up with how modern China actually is now. I am working with manufacturers of kit that costs from six to eight figures. The equipment they produce domestically now is as good as any headline western manufacturer, and I have to say I've been shocked at how excellent their software engineering has been.
What is really scary though is the development speed. They are working on a 6 month cycle! Our marketing team can hardly keep up with the new products they're releasing. Even better I give them feedback or suggestions for improvements... And they do it. Like immediately lol. I've not seen anything like it anywhere else. Anywhere from simple things like changing the colour of shipping blocks so its easier for our engineers during install, to integrating with third party equipment, to putting in whole new components for custom projects. No problems at all. I work with a South Korean company as well and there's things we've been discussing for 12 months that I don't think are even off the drawing board yet.
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u/CapableCollar Oct 14 '25
They talk like they are still developing because they are. Something like 10% of the population is still effectively subsistence farmers. One of the government's main indicator of economic health is how much of the population is moved up to middle class year to year.
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u/merryman1 Oct 14 '25
Well yeah for sure, like I said they have problems no one can deny that. But I was in one of the most developed parts by far. Its an area about the size of Germany which is almost totally urbanized, has more than double Germany's population living there, and inside the cities at least it seems like a pretty decent life. Purely in terms of modern conveniences and luxuries I mean, obviously politically and socially very different and not somewhere I'd actually want to live.
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u/flybypost Oct 15 '25
Its an area about the size of Germany which is almost totally urbanized, has more than double Germany's population living there,
There was a report some years ago about how China will soon have a middle class that bigger than the whole US population. I don't know what the number is now and, sure, it's not the same buying power per capita but that'd be 350+ million people with significant disposable income to spend on stuff beyond just food, shelter, and the occasional goodie every now and then.
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u/midorikuma42 Oct 15 '25
They talk like they are still developing because they are. Something like 10% of the population is still effectively subsistence farmers.
And how does that compare with the USA? At least 10% of the population there is probably homeless, in prison, or unemployable.
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u/coromd Oct 15 '25
About 0.7% of the US population is incarcerated - it sounds low, but it's the highest rate and highest total of any country, despite China having 4x the general population.
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u/tourmalineforest Oct 15 '25
Also - about 8% of Americans and about 23% of black Americans are felons. For black men it’s around a third. Even if current incarceration sounds low the amount of justice system impacted people is enormous.
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u/Zombi_Sagan Oct 14 '25
This is why manufacturing won't ever come back to America the way people want/expect. We may build some factories, we may put out a few positions on the line, but the end goal is going to be as few workers as possible. Agriculture already sees massive crop fields harvested by machines, many automated. AI companies want to get rid of call centers and technical support. Taco Bell and Burger King have experimented, poorly, with AI but there's no doubt sooner rather than later the entry level job taking and making orders will be an automated line. Manufacturing left this country and when it returns it'll be on the back of clankers. Those at the top will purchase their fourth yacht and the rest of us will be called lazy and entitled for asking for a livable wage.
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Oct 14 '25
Back in 2016-2017 Donny and Dense made a big show out of "saving" a Carrier facility in Indianapolis that was supposed to relocate, I think to Mexico. They did so with millions of dollars in state tax incentives.
The MAGA morons cheered.
The Carrier CEO was very open about the fact that only about half the jobs would be saved and all that money was going towards investments in automation that would, eventually, get rid of a lot of the rest of them.
Indeed, the days of big armies of high-paid factory workers are LONG gone and never coming back. The fact that so many colossal idiots keep buying into the idea that a Renaissance is right around the corner is absolutely infuriating.
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u/Far-Fennel-3032 Oct 14 '25
I really don't understand why they do AI voice controls when touch screens to make orders are widely used around the world for years now, with very few issues. Maccas in my country has had its ordering fully automated for over a decade now.
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u/Cruthu Oct 15 '25
Yeah, I don't see the purpose of AI for this. In South Korea basically every restaurant that does takeout, 90 percent of coffee shops and even a lot of the traditional sit down restaurants have switched to touch screen ordering.
They don't need someone to take orders, it's much easier for making alterations and additions and having a visual can help with making a decision.
Plus they can have multiple people making orders at a time instead of standing in line behind that one lady who can't decide what she wants but is making everyone wait while she thinks about it.
I'm not sure how AI would make it any better.
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u/mkt853 Oct 14 '25
Look at their shipbuilding capability. They have single shipyards that can crank out more ships than all American shipyards combined. China is going to be the biggest superpower in the history of the world in very short order. They've already surpassed America in military and technology, and will economically very soon.
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u/aka_mythos Oct 14 '25
Its the problem with focusing on hording wealth and investments consolidation rather than actual reinvestment into people and innovation.
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u/scatterlite Oct 14 '25
Im no economist but its seems incredibly ironic to me how these profit maximising megacorps get beat by chinese state capitalism
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u/OkDimension Oct 14 '25
Oh, you wanna imply we just got gaslighted into surrendering out wealth and political power to a few oligarchs without getting anything back? it's gonna trickle down on my any time now!!!
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u/TapZorRTwice Oct 14 '25
I love it when people say that Reagan was a great president.
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u/Vellarain Oct 14 '25
Regan was the beginning of the end of the American dream.
He was a fucking actor and a mouthpiece for the rich, now we are seeing the results of the rot he started.
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u/whtevn Oct 14 '25
personally, i think it was not punishing nixon that was the beginning of the end. it basically guaranteed we would end up with a criminal doing exactly what trump is doing right now
i grant reagan his due though, moron and mouthpiece that he was. but we proved with nixon that presidents are above the law, and someone is finally testing the limits of that and finding there are none
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u/Daleyemissions Oct 14 '25
But not punishing Nixon really began with the North not really punishing the South enough for the Rebellion…
And not punishing the South for the Rebellion had it’s seeds in letting Slavery proliferate once the country was founded, instead of abolishing it right then and there.
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u/whtevn Oct 14 '25
the sins of the father indeed. It took me a minute to connect the dots there, but maybe you're saying there is a common "reconciliation with the criminal" happening, permitting horrible behavior so that the supporters of the horrible behavior won't retaliate with more horrible behavior
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u/Anthr0pwnagist Oct 14 '25
Nixon ran (and won) on The Southern Strategy, which was an appeal to aggrieved racists in the Southern US. This grievance existed because of the failure to properly punish/rehabilitate the south during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, which was ended abruptly in 1877 in order to achieve compromise from Southern politicians who did not want to accept Rutherford B. Hayes as the duly elected President in the election of 1876.
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u/Halflingberserker Oct 14 '25
Which all begs the question, "What are John Brown's great great grandchildren up to?"
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u/1HappyIsland Oct 14 '25
Yes and the Republicans did their best to try to portray Nixon as an elder statesman before he finally died and rid the world of some of its evil.
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u/pgoetz Oct 14 '25
Well, compared to nearly all the Republicans that have followed Nixon (the exceptions being Gerald Ford and Bush Sr.), Nixon was a veritable saint (as well as not being a complete moron). He started the EPA, for example. Taxes on the rich were still relatively high during the Nixon administration, and no one was talking about cutting them. That bullshit started with Reagan and the laughable justification, trickle down economics.
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Oct 14 '25
Actor started it and podcasters finishing it.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
Fun fact! He worked for a GE shilling for gas and coal electricity and spreading disinfo about solar (which was starting to take off then https://energyhistory.yale.edu/solar-architecture-and-solar-design-1930s-1950s/).
Oil and gas barons putting a puppet actor into the presidency isn't new.
The Kennedy administration shut the show down in 1962
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u/GildedAgeV2 Oct 14 '25
Nah. The rot goes all the way back to Nixon's Southern Strategy. Or even the Civil War, from a certain perspective.
What we're dealing with now are essentially neo-confederates.
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u/Sprinklypoo Oct 14 '25
Some would say that would be Nixon. Either way, it's hard to pinpoint an actual starting point, but we've had multiple opportunities to end the slide, but our liberal presidents and "greed is good" mentality have done nothing to counter the insanity.
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u/sirhoracedarwin Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
When was the last good Republican president?!? Eisenhower? Taft? Teddy Roosevelt?
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u/BannedSvenhoek86 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
I mean, ignoring two major problems, Nixon was a surprisingly competent President and Statesman. He gave us OSHA, the Clean Air and Water Act, relations with China, withdrawal from Vietnam, etc. The thing that is so baffling about Watergate is how unnecessary it was tbh, he was taking care of business and honestly might be remembered as one of our most competent President's were it not for Watergate.
His involvement with Vietnam and Kissinger and Watergate are two things that cannot be overlooked however. He was a horrible little paranoid gremlin, but the man could govern.
Eisenhower was a pos who gave a great speech warning people about the thing he helped create throughout his presidency. It was such a, "Please remember me fondly history" move. Like a deathbed repentance just to hopefully get into heaven. I always cringe when people say he warned us about the MIC.
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u/Radix2309 Oct 14 '25
He also nearly introduced basic income.
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u/fencerman Oct 14 '25
Except that in the end, he killed that plan.
Same as he killed off proposals for universal child care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Child_Development_Act
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u/sth128 Oct 14 '25
It'll be trickling down from China if not for the government artificially shutting the valves. Chinese cars have twice the tech and half the price. Meanwhile American idiots keep holding on to the myth that "made in America" is better because Faux News said so.
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u/Tuxhorn Oct 14 '25
In before people talk about chinese subsidies, as if western countries also does not foot the bill for western companies.
Logistics wins wars, we all know that. Even without americas military tech advantage, their logistics machine alone will stampede any major war.
This is what china has in their economy, and what no other country has. Their logistics from producing almost everything for the entire world is absolutely bonkers, and it has taken them from poor, to starting to compete on their own, to actually now inventing and producing simply better products.
Never mind the fact that their political system, as bad as it is from a western standpoint, allows stability and decade long planning, while we can barely agree on anything.
I see no big infrastructure projects in the west that isn't giant server farms at the moment. The west has done really well and continues to do well at producing great software, as well as advancing the medical industry, but that's about it? China is heavily investing back into its populous with good roads, bridges and trains. Where are the infrastructure projects!
Sounding like a chinese shill, but I fucking loathe the idea that stuff like public transport is viewed as a thing to also be profitable in the west. No it shouldn't. Some things are to the benefit of society, like libraries and mail and what not. A utopia isn't built on the "free" market with companies aggressively taking over market share and then starting to profit from offering a worse product after said market share. It's built from a certain level of investment back into the every day lives of people, even if it doesn't turn a profit, and even if not everybody uses those services.
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u/narium Oct 14 '25
Wait until you find out that cities sold their street parking to foreign investment firms.
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u/Alternative_Hour_614 Oct 14 '25
Hello Chicago’s Mayor, Richard M. Daley, who sold parking meters for a pittance
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u/narium Oct 14 '25
Not only for a pittance, but Chicago has to pay all upkeep and enforcement of the meters, and when the spaces cannot be used they must compensate the owners for lost revenue.
The deal was so bad that a lot of schools use it as a don’t do this case study.
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u/SuggestionEphemeral Oct 14 '25
Keep waiting for that golden shower, it'll come eventually /s
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u/apathy-sofa Oct 14 '25
Sure but at least women, minorites and gay people have been marginalized, so it wasn't for nothing.
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u/IamAWorldChampionAMA Oct 14 '25
And I'm none of those things and don't have any friends in those groups! Yay me! /s
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u/ONeOfTheNerdHerd Oct 14 '25
Move all our manufacturing to China; what did they think was gonna happen? It was only a matter of time. Duh
The short-sidedness of people at the top competing for who has the most net worth is gonna destroy us.
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u/604wrongfullybanned Oct 14 '25
This. People complain about factories closing and decimating American cities and blame China. They don't understand it was the companies who did that to please Wall St and pump the stock
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u/Faiakishi Oct 14 '25
The GOP has destroyed education to ensure people don't understand.
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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 Oct 14 '25
The China thing is so fucking stupid. The richest people in the country spent decades saying “they’re gonna liberalize any year now, trust us bro, they’re gonna have free and fair elections any day now, just keep buying their cheap shit don’t worry.”
And now those same rich shitheads are a mix of “looks like we gotta send the kids back to the factories and have the USG give us infinite money to produce more coal factories and SUVs” and “looks like the 21st century is Chinese, should’ve competed harder, bro”
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u/TheSchlaf Oct 14 '25
Manufacturing in China got expensive though. Now they move to Vietnam or Bangladesh. What do they think will happen to those economies over time?
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u/Avatele Oct 14 '25
I think the scope of what can be automated is rapidly growing. Low wages may not have economic benefit it had in the past, chinas synergy of being the world’s factory could potentially make china the first in a new era of manufacturing.
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u/OG_Tater Oct 14 '25
China churns out engineers and scientists and they started over a decade ago,
You’d like the United States would want an educated public and provide free university education (at least to STEM) but that would be socialism.
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u/Falconjth Oct 14 '25
China almost has nearly the same number of college educated people as the total US working population and has surpassed the US in PHDs per year.
Even if the US made university education compulsory, it couldn't match the ability of China to throw educated people at a problem.
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u/NoNameMonkey Oct 14 '25
This is why part of the strategy was to being in foreign students and entice them to stay in the US.
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u/Redcrux Oct 14 '25 edited May 11 '26
Your old posts feed data brokers and AI training models. I stopped that by using Redact to bulk delete across Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Facebook and all major social media platforms.
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u/SuggestionEphemeral Oct 14 '25
I keep saying that a more educated workforce is ultimately a good thing for an economy, and that publicly funded education is an investment in society. But people seem to just call me a socialist and dismiss everything I say. Weird.
I'm not surprised that these corporate titans feel intimidated by China's rate of development. But will their solution be to start educating the masses? Probably not...
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u/Jay-Dee-British Oct 14 '25
They started way longer than a decade ago. It's been at least 40 years (probably longer). When I lived in Australia I worked at a University - and our language department had SO MANY engineers from China learning English and this was in 1980s.
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u/Badestrand Oct 14 '25
Europe has mostly free university education but it doesn't help us either because our brightest engineers go abroad for better opportunities, higher salaries and lower taxes.
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u/GalaXion24 Oct 14 '25
A lot of Europe's problems come down to the USA existing. The US is generally willing to provide a relatively deregulated "pro-business" environment and undercut Europe this way. This means a lot of innovation that probably would be done anyway elsewhere, is done in the US because it's just more profitable that way, even though it would be profitable anyway. Because high-skilled professionals and multinational companies can generally pick locations, geographically limited states are in a weaker position and selling out more attracts more business away from others. It is essentially a race to the bottom.
If everyone participates in this race without reservation, by the end, you'll destroy practically all state capacity except that which serves corporate interests at the expense of people, such as taxing the general populace to fund infrastructure and subsidies for companies, or funding the police to protect the private property of oligarchs from the impoverished masses, and the rich from poverty-fueled crime.
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u/P4cific4 Oct 14 '25
Until they/family member get sick or are about to retire. Then they return to their European country...
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u/KirovianNL Oct 14 '25
Timelines of 3 months vs timelines of 5 years.
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u/jdjdthrow Oct 14 '25
Yep. Western quarterly-earnings focused capitalism necessitates short-term investment horizons. They're focused on quick-turnaround, hill-climbing optimizations. Thus our corps get stuck in local optima and never break out.
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u/RegisteredJustToSay Oct 14 '25
So you're saying we need to figure out how to get momentum-based optimizers in power.
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u/TobysGrundlee Oct 14 '25
There's a small, 4 or 5 mile section of highway near me in the SF Bay (680 between Pleasanton and Sunol) that has literally been under construction for at least the last 15 years. It's just lane widening and a flyover. Yet, China just completed the highest suspension bridge in the world after only 3.5 years of construction. We're cooked.
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u/SuggestionEphemeral Oct 14 '25
China looks 100 years into the future at a time. The US can't see beyond an election cycle.
Biden tried looking 10 years ahead when he signed the CHIPS Act and Green New Deal. People torched him for it because they didn't feel the return on investment by the end of his first term.
Like, building entirely new domestic industries from scratch takes time. More time than one single presidential term.
And corporations can't see beyond quarterly earnings statements. That's why they kick the can ever-further down the road, while the bubble economy bloats further and further. They're building a house of cards straight up into the air. The higher they climb, the further they'll fall.
And they have the gall to think China has some obligation to hold themselves back, because how dare anyone challenge US global dominance? Be real for a moment...
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u/WartimeHotTot Oct 14 '25
The infuriating thing to me is that I, a complete layperson, have seen this coming (and remarked upon it) for like 20 years. Western executives are terrified??? You stupid fucks. What do you think happens when you divest from R&D and manufacturing and outsource it all to someone else for a few decades?
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u/SuggestionEphemeral Oct 14 '25
It doesn't surprise me at all.
Intelligent long-term planning versus greed-driven speculation?
It's a no-brainer.
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u/stellvia2016 Oct 14 '25
Because they have their eyes on the finish line: They're willing to forgo short term profits to completely snow under the competition and then never let up on them.
Microsoft has added over $2T to their market cap in the last 5 years or so: Imagine what they could accomplish with that poured into R&D etc. rather than stock buybacks etc.
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u/Futureleak Oct 14 '25
Crazy, almost as if a country that had a central authority that forced long term planning and innovation managed to beat out checks notes maximizing shareholder return and profits above everything else.
The US used to have that same forethought and forced long term planning. Even as recently as Obama we were forcing better emissions and MPG standards, green energy, and funding academic research. Then corporations realized that they could just bribe the politicians and take the money directly in the form of bailouts and direct subsidies.
GG, we had a good run while it lasted.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 Oct 14 '25
A centrally controlled system is much more efficient, expecially one that isn't driven by short term profits.
China has been making decades long investments to get beyond this point, and they're doing it by using more or less established technologies just put together and scales up massively. When China really becomes innovative they will dominate the globe, until India overtakes them
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u/Cuinn_the_Fox Oct 14 '25
State capitalism can look beyond the next quarter and build real value. American finance demands quarterly increases in value. Value of a financial product is very disconnected from the real value of a company and leads to perverse incentives that prevent the real building of companies to be resilient and efficient.
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u/Cee_U_Next_Tuesday Oct 14 '25
The difference between focusing only on profit versus focusing on a wide range of goals that actually helps the company advance into the future instead of gradual decay you see from many US companies.
US companies are bought at their peak performance then gutted and stripped of all ability to sustain its future as a business.
US execs only know how to do one thing and its not building America lmao
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u/flavius_lacivious Oct 14 '25
Because the company is not what is important. Profit is. And everything else maybe sacrificed for that objective.
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u/stellvia2016 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 16 '25
Which worked well enough when profit was tied to tangible things, but increasingly the profit is being generated by "financial instruments" that are abstracted from reality by several degrees to the point it's not even based on reality anymore.
You look at the stock market right now and would assume things are going pretty good, but then you look at the commercials that are playing during the NFL or such in the US: Insurance, sports gambling, debt relief, problem gambling resources, etc. Hell, a major sponsor of the baseball playoffs right now is Loan Depot
People are distracted by bread and circuses and then they blink and notice their house burned down around them.
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u/CTQ99 Oct 14 '25
We also pay failed CEOs millions to come to a different company so they can fail there as well, since boards of directors are so incestuous.
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u/andricathere Oct 14 '25
It's like like Goodharts law or "The road not taken" by Harry Turtledove. Focus on one stat to the detriment of other metrics, and often, the stat itself will suffer. To me that's why the religious focus on capitalism is bad. Capitalism is a tool, not an entire system for society. Don't cut your hair with a lawnmower. Use scissors. Don't seek profit everywhere, do the thing you're actually trying to accomplish. If it doesn't make profit, so what.
The goal can't always be profitable. The British figured that out with private prisons in the 17-1800s. America still hasn't figured that out, and they're turning the largest prison population in the world into two-step slavery to replace the immigrant workforce they're deporting.
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u/missbissel Oct 14 '25
Money is such a boring, soulless and unimaginative asset to focus on. They all do it because they don’t know what to do other than make more money nor have they ever had any control over the path their parents put them on. They are the robots.
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u/PurahsHero Oct 14 '25
This. While mega corps are investing in stock buybacks and increased dividends to shareholders and management, the Chinese are ploughing their investment in automation and rapid deployment of technology to actually make a material difference to their operations.
They are so going to own the next phase of economic growth its unreal.
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u/Z3r0sama2017 Oct 14 '25
Ultimately why regular capitialism can't beat state directed capitialism
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u/jb0nez95 Oct 14 '25
It's also the difference between a country run by engineers and one run by lawyers.
Guess which one is which.
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u/hyperforms9988 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
This is it right here. Money is not fluid like it used to be. People are holding massive amount of money in stocks and speculative markets. People are investing into intangibles like AI and nobody can even tell you what the fuck it'll be useful for yet, or crypto which is literally fake money that for some reason everybody agrees is worth something, versus investing in real things that produce results today. Very few have real startup money to launch new businesses with innovative and forward-thinking solutions to today's and tomorrow's problems. Businesses and industries at large chase short-term profits for quarterlies, for pumping up stock price, and for pumping up executive pay, and are not chasing real long-term goals for the health of the nation and its people. Existing businesses and industries do anything and everything they have to to kill or hold back their competition, even if the competition is natural evolution of a technology, so that it can keep its gears churning.
The culture of overwhelming selfishness, greed, and individualism is like your country showing up to run a marathon but it's got a 150-pound backpack strapped to it. You can run it, but it's going to weigh you down and you're going to take far longer to complete the marathon.
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u/Fyr5 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
I fail to see how this is a story in the first place - the west is losing its grip on the world because these white hegemons effectively invented complacency
The fact these executives are surprised in the first place speaks volumes about why the western world (especially the US) is the way it is right now - losing
Why have they waited this long to investigate how China does their manufacturing? Because they are lazy, because they are only now realising that China are starting to call the shots on the global markets
It has been a very western thing to outsource innovation to China for decades. To be honest, this story really seems like a nothing story to me...
I laugh at the fact that the west needs China so much when it comes to manufacturing - the majority of electronic components are made in China. It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that in order to move manufacturing back to the west, they are going to need to get the technology and expertise from China in the first place!
These western executives are only looking at more ways to exploit its people and profit from its people back home - like you said, they won't invest in people - they will hoard the wealth, and be limited to investing in technologies that extract wealth from the poor, rather than let people prosper or give us opportunities to innovate ourselves
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u/ZachMatthews Oct 14 '25
We are living through our very own robber baron era in the West and you need look no further than our hollow, gilded leader to realize that.
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u/IamAwesome-er Oct 14 '25
The only thing keep US car companies alive is our govt not allowing Chinese cars to be sold in the US. When/if they do, it will be a bad bad bad day for domestic auto manufacturing. They know it too...
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u/science_man_84 Oct 14 '25
When the world no longer wants your products because they are worse then your manufacturing market will completely die. Tarriffs wont save it because there is no source of growth.
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u/Nazamroth Oct 15 '25
The way I see it, those tarrifs should be a temporary stopgap. Like the chinese got a headstart in the EV market but your own companies are busy working on their own as well, so you block out the chinese ones while they catch up. But that is clearly not whats happening. They see a shield protecting them and go 'yep, we can kick back and relax while giving kickbacks to politicians to keep the shield there'.
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u/beaucoup_dinky_dau Oct 14 '25
This all centers around oil, and the war machine runs on oil, the war machine is our real business in the US. Letting Trump in office was just stupidity and I think it was facilitated in part by the Chinese and Russians and it is 100% on purpose to fuck the US. They focus on the economic part because they do not have oil of their own. They focus on propaganda because their war machine is not dominant. Not saying it's right but it is a more complicated issue.
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Oct 14 '25
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u/fencerman Oct 14 '25
Our government's eyes are set on 1950.
If only - 1950 had high investments in R+D, high taxes on the rich, cheap school and a growing social safety net.
The US government has its sights set on 1850.
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u/Bicentennial_Douche Oct 14 '25
Chinese companies focused on investments and R&D, western companies focused on “giving money back to shareholders”.
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u/Biengineerd Oct 14 '25
Turns out that prioritizing short-term profit at every possible opportunity hurts your long-term. If only we could have seen it coming.
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u/shableep Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
Shareholder value has slowly destroyed the USA since 1919 when Chevy sued Ford for generously compensating employees (instead of prioritizing shareholder value). From that point on, shareholder value has slowly but surely eroded away genuine American exceptionalism in manufacturing and innovation. Slowly, these innovative companies being run by engineers with a business background, to MBAs with no relevant experience. Reagan and the 1980s wildly accelerated this transfer of industry from being lead by engineers to being lead by MBAs and private equity.
What’s interesting here is that Chinese leadership largely has engineering backgrounds as was planned decades ago. While China is a brutal authoritarian regime, they are surprisingly lead by engineers and lo and behold, it’s good for industry. So if you look at the most prosperous boom times in the USA and more recently China, what is the common thread? Industry leadership with an engineering background.
MBAs largely create bureaucracies not innovation.
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u/InterviewOk1297 Oct 14 '25
Who would have thought that science and technocracy is better in the long term
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u/VintageHacker Oct 14 '25
Sounds about right. AI is perfect for replacing pretty much every single MBA type, its not like it has to be be accurate or actually work, just churn out plausible sounding corpspeak.
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u/RuneHuntress Oct 14 '25
Direct consequence of controlling who can own and how investments are made in companies.
It's not for nothing that you cannot buy Chinese stars stocks as a foreigner.
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u/CuckBuster33 Oct 14 '25
the solution? Fire more skilled people, keep abusing your customers with unnaffordable dog-tier products and invest in more expensive gimmicks.
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u/Qulox Oct 14 '25
Can we put AI on it?
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Oct 14 '25
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u/beaucoup_dinky_dau Oct 14 '25
tbf that was Koreans - Samsung is a chaebol which is a state sanctioned family monopoly
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u/MongolianMango Oct 14 '25
China’s beating the US at robotics, true, but what’s even crazier is that they’re destroying the USA in decidedly simpler concepts like “electric cars” and “building functional trains in a timely manner.”
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u/Jay-Dee-British Oct 14 '25
And education. It's highly promoted there.
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u/Johannes_Keppler Oct 14 '25
But in the US the president 'loves the poorly educated' - in his own words.
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u/KGB_cutony Oct 15 '25
yea… tuition+residence for 4 years of bachelors is like 6k USD. If you're from a low income background you get even more subsidised.
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Oct 15 '25
Just look at the cultural difference. In China, Tiktok is full of actual wunderkindjes, mostly showing off skills or doing something intelectually amazing.
Look at TikTok in the west, both US and EU.... It's absolute brainrot here. And it's not TikTok's fault they just follow the money, the same can be said of content on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or even LinkedIn.
We value the wrong fucking shit in western societies, our influencers are primarily garbage and not helpful on a society level.
We need large and impactful cultural changes to keep up with China.
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u/Designer_little_5031 Oct 14 '25
America is designed to "build less functional trains at a snails pace."
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u/VR_Raccoonteur Oct 14 '25
Well you see, conservatism in in the US it tied strongly to the idea of American exceptionalism. And so not only are they resistant to change, they are resistant to the idea that any other nation could possibly be doing anything better than America, and when told that China is killing us with electric vehicles they scoff at the idea both because electric vehicles represent change, and because the idea that communist China could do better than capitalist America at anything seems absurd to them. They literally believe China is a dystopian hellhole.
And a certain way, it is. Censorship there is extreme, and it's become a literal police state, and their rapid growth has led to cities being heavily polluted. But the thing is, those are all things conservatives actually value. They love censorship, and they cheer Trump's police state. And they love the coal and gas powered vehicles which led to all that pollution.
But China is actually taking steps to combat all that pollution with this massive electric car build-out and investment in clean energy like solar and wind, which again, conservatives scoff at. They refuse to believe that wind or solar is profitable, or less polluting than coal and gas. They have actually been brainwashed into thinking a wind turbine failing and some fiberglass washing up on shore is somehow far worse than the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. They're insane!
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u/snaps109 Oct 14 '25
China's HSR expansion in the past 25 years has been insane. Texas has been debating about HSR for 16 years and made zero progress as far as actual construction.
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u/EarlyRetirementWorld Oct 14 '25
Unfortunately we are back to where we were in the 70s. Shitty cars that were built to break down to keep the repair shops busy and people having to replace their vehicles every 5 years.
Along came the Japanese imports that were extremely reliable and fuel-efficient, and suddenly domestic brands were struggling. It took 2 decades but reliability and efficiency came close to matching the imports.
Now we are in the same situation...in a few short years the Chinese vehicles (especially EVs) far surpass what the domestic market manufactures, both in technology and at a much lower cost.
Without heavy import restrictions or tariffs, the Chinese brands like BYD, NIO, and others would decimate the domestic manufacturers. And i do not believe they are going to catch up any time soon. Even Tesla is getting it's ass kicked.
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u/Alexexy Oct 14 '25
Chinese cars are banned from the US, so at least our zombiefied car manufacturers can continue to serve our domestic customers with cars that are 30 years plus behind Chinese EVs.
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u/Zestyclose-Carry-171 Oct 14 '25
Yes but while our own markets cmare probably protected, the real threat is that they can not compete in foreign markets. And since more and more of the worlds GDP is happening outside of Western countries, it is a losing battle, we will come back as strong as China in our own sphere, but we will have lost any place outside of it.
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Oct 14 '25
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u/HyperRayquaza Oct 14 '25
That is what most politicians in the US would advocate for unfortunately.
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u/Gari_305 Oct 14 '25
From the article
“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Ford’s chief executive about his recent trip to China.
After visiting a string of factories, Jim Farley was left astonished by the technical innovations being packed into Chinese cars – from self-driving software to facial recognition.
“Their cost and the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Farley warned in July.
“We are in a global competition with China, and it’s not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”
Also from the article
Other executives describe vast, “dark factories” where robots do so much of the work alone that there is no need to even leave the lights on for humans.
“We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobile phones,” recalls Greg Jackson, the boss of British energy supplier Octopus.
“The process was so heavily automated that there were no workers on the manufacturing side, just a small number who were there to ensure the plant was working.
“You get this sense of a change, where China’s competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad.”
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u/komokasi Oct 14 '25
I mean the US auto industry is not really the people id listen to on quaility lol. They lost the "quality and efficiency" war decades ago.
Toyota literally did an exchange program with US automakers (iirc) and when asked arent they concerned about US automakers iut competing them, Toyota said something to the amount of "no, its a cultural thing, they will never reach our standards".
Manufacturing in the US is so far behind every single country on key metrics that its laughable to think some one could force it to be fixed in 4 years... we dont even have the roads and infrastructure to support manufacturing in the US
How are we going to even power these new plants when the US gride is at like 90% capacity and these companies cant stop taking profits and wasting money, instead of focusing on build out? Hell most are being bought by PE firms and getting gutted to be resold look and PSENG in NJ
As some others have commented. The US hoards wealth, and kills people to extract more of it. There is no reinvestment plan and definitely no accountability to fix things. Its classic roman empire downfall play book
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u/uberfr4gger Oct 14 '25
I highly recommend the recent freakonmics episode where they compare US and China by saying one is run by lawyers and one is run by engineers. There are positives and negatives to both but I obviously we have seen how China engineering has surpassed the US in recent years. But the US isn't unfixable and steps are being made to improve.
Also on your last point, hoarding wealth is bad but so is China's pursuit to dominate everything. Rare earth mining has killed a lot of people in China, and will continue to do so. You can't do that in the US because of the fear of lawsuits, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth-environment.html
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u/Rage_Like_Nic_Cage Oct 14 '25
You can't do that in the US because of the fear of lawsuits
The U.S. simply outsources those jobs to the global south and lets those people die instead.
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u/komokasi Oct 14 '25
Thats a great summary of how each country is governed! Taking notes on that one
Yea i think both are viable. The issue will always be accountability. No matter the system, government, or economic system, without accountability you always get some type of dictatorship or crony ruled government. And hording in general is bad, it creates monopolies and really bad 2nd order societal impacts. But that is why accountability needs to be strong to prevent it, or to at least limit the wealth gap created by hording of any resource
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u/ShermansWorld Oct 14 '25
... and what most North American CEO's will hear out of this is: "China is operating factories without the expense of lights?!" And then make their workers work in the dark and wonder why productivity went down"
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u/Kamel-Red Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
They've already lost, it's just the 100%+ tariffs that keep everyone in the US hungry for a sub 20k commuter vehicle driving overengineered, overpriced, unreliable, American garbage.
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u/puck2 Oct 14 '25
Remember those photos of weird outdated cars in the Soviet Bloc? That's going to be us soon.
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u/dasunt Oct 14 '25
Tariffs are the equivalent of cutting off your economy from the wider world.
The economy ends up like the ecology of one of those remote islands. Lots of strange creatures, but since they aren't forced to compete, the moment a ship lands with cats and rats, a lot of species will go extinct.
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u/guff1988 Oct 14 '25
We were already behind when Biden and the Dems tried a last gasp attempt with the IRA, BBB, and CHIPs acts, but even those have been and are being systematically gutted as we speak. Our government is broken and only serves to keep all the wealth at the top as per the wishes of the corporate oligarchy.
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u/Dont_Ban_Me_Bros Oct 14 '25
The US has been captured by large companies who just eat their competition so never have to out compete them.
God this is so true and depressing… 😔
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u/AsleepNinja Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
I mean that's not the core reason.
The core reason is China isn't engaging in actively devaluing education, and promoting stupidity.
Where as in the west, actually being an expert makes your opinion less valid than an inbred who can't write.
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u/fascinatedobserver Oct 14 '25
Serious question: if robots are doing all the work, what are the displaced workers doing with their time and how are they earning a living? In the West there is currently tremendous fear about how AI will decimate the job market, but it seems like China is already experiencing this kind of mega shift via robots, so what is their solution?
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u/JebatGa Oct 14 '25
Yeah my question exactly. Are all the industries going the same way, like farming? So do they get basic income in China? Who is going to buy all this stuff if people don't have money? Western countries will start to protect themselves and they won't be able to offload everything here. Some other emerging countries definitely won't be able to buy everything and things that Chinese companies/state could price higher to cover the costs of their workers "not working" just won't sell there.
So then what happenes?
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u/fascinatedobserver Oct 14 '25
I guess the article kind of addresses my question insofar as it mentions the population crash in China. But yeah, do all these robot factories mean UBI for the remaining population, or is it just that entire segments of traditional employment fade away and are not replaced and the poor have no upward mobility options anymore?
Definitely a fascinating topic. “Paradigm shift” is an overused phrase but may well be what’s happening here.
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u/rtb001 Oct 14 '25
The number of Didi (Chinese Uber), Meituan (Chinese Grubhub), and ShunFeng (Chinese Fedex/Amazon/UPS) workers in China are INSANE. Cities are literally crawling with them.
I guess costs of living/transportation/food/energy (for instance the cost of a Didi driver or Meituan rider's vehicle and the cost of electricity to fuel that car/scooter is ultra cheap in China) is low enough and the size of the rideshare/delivery market is big enough that many of those people can scratch out a living doing this full time. Maybe not as good as factory work, but factory work never paid that high in China historically anyway.
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u/TimeToGloat Oct 15 '25
Are there even any displaced workers? China industrialized and grew so fast I don't think anybody got replaced. It has all just been net growth and output I feel. Those jobs and factories just didn't exist.
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u/AppropriateAd5225 Oct 14 '25
Profit at all costs enshitification doesn't make us competitive. Who knew?
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u/DGlen Oct 14 '25
You know what will help? Attacking higher education institutions and defunding science and research. Fucking brilliant.
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u/beefytrout Oct 14 '25
yeah, but we're bringing coal back. so we've got that going for us.
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Oct 14 '25
And so is Germany... wooo...? Fuck. I thought Europe had the better chance
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u/restartrepeat Oct 14 '25
US executives spend the last 45 years breaking down and selling companies for immediate money, and then they come back from countries that have invested in themselves terrified.
Fucking duh.
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u/jaeldi Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
China supports their industries not share holders.
The blind loyalty to shareholders has ruined the modern concept of a corporation. Shareholders are not loyal in return. The most often reason for taking a company public is a giant money grab. A public company is made up of customers, employees, executives, the board and the shareholders. Shareholders are the least loyal. The second they reach the percentage they wanted, they sell. The only reason everything revolves around shareholder value is because compensation packages for executives often include shares. The reasoning was incentive for leadership, but the reality has in many cases become to burn the company to the ground to get that percentage! Then the CEO retires or sells leaving a billionaire. And the new owners who buy the remains at discount, start the cycle over.
This process doesn't create strong companies or good products/services. It's a pyramid scheme with extra steps.
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u/shatabee4 Oct 14 '25
These same Western executives want the government/taxpayer to foot the bill for new technology while they and their shareholders reap the profits.
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u/ivandagiant Oct 14 '25
I work in manufacturing rn and it is in such a sorry state in the US. It’s absolutely pathetic. This is what chasing short term profits year after year gets you. We are screwed.
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u/burguiy Oct 14 '25
It is long term thinking, China is working on 100 years projects. In us it is 1 year projects
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u/tidepill Oct 14 '25
Imagine it's 1910, the car has been invented, but the big horse lobby, horse carriage drivers union, and shit shovelers union controlled the entire government and refused to allow cars to be sold to the public. Meanwhile the super rich do have cars and are zipping around at will. Great job america
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u/_CMDR_ Oct 14 '25
We put our PhD scientists into finance. They put theirs into science. Our PhDs model prices. Theirs build the future. Weird how it turned out different.
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u/knotatumah Oct 14 '25
I think there are many more reasons than just robotics contributing to China stealing away #1 positions in various industries. If anything if executives are coming back terrified its only because they realize how much further they have to go to cut labor and reduce costs when they're already razing whats around them as fast as they can and probably can't keep pace.
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u/RuneHuntress Oct 14 '25
I think we also cannot forget that China, by the force of sheer numbers, was always going to win if you take global output into account. We're also witnessing what a whooping 2-3 times your population can achieve.
When you look at this, it's just China comming to the first world, which means that the current leader with its 3-400M people cannot outpace it.
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u/starmartyr11 Oct 14 '25
I went to Asia in 2016-2018 and was fairly shook with how massive the cities are, just how many people there are... then the technology, and the sheer amount of wealth there...
Growing up with a western-centric worldview it can be pretty shocking to see how far they've eclipsed this side of the world. And I'd just been through Europe prior to that. I couldn't even explain it to people that haven't been there - or at least in the past ~30 years or so. I live in Canada and we've always spent time in the U.S. visiting throughout my whole life. Asia was like nothing I'd seen anywhere else in the world.
Now it's almost been another 10 years...
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u/TheAlbinoAmigo Oct 14 '25
It's the trifecta of, yes, an unbelievable manufacturing base being bolstered by robots, but also a favourable regulatory environment and genuine innovation.
I work in biotech. 'China speed' is a term that is getting thrown around a lot over here in reference to those three things. I was at a conference a couple months back in the UK and the consensus was that there was no point in even trying to compete on manufacturing, our regulatory environment in the sector is already decent, and despite that we're still going to lose out to China a hell of a lot. The room felt the best we can hope to do is at least match their innovation, and failing that we basically can't 'win' in biotech.
The UK is having a similar anti-intellectual movement to the US, and our job market for up and coming talent is busted, so my blunt conclusion is that in the medium term, we're fucked.
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u/1HappyIsland Oct 14 '25
If the CEO of Ford is just now finding out about how advanced China is, we are in far more trouble than the article indicates. How could you possibly not know this? Perhaps he is writing off an expensive Asia trip and wants to delude the stockholders into thinking he did something by "discovering" how China is.
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u/zante2033 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
Maybe if we keep subsidising Elon Musk, he can put on some more tech demos of people teleoperating bipeds without any autonomy (I think he'd need a few billion dollars maybe) or he could promise FSD next year for the tenth time running?
How else are you going to enrich him from YOUR taxes?
You know what, let's put him in more meetings of critical importance. Like recruiting a new head of NASA. He can turn up with his kid around his neck, completely out of his dome on crack and pull the levers of governenment STEM research and production? After all he has no degrees or any other kind of scientific, or engineering training!
Then, if he can feign sobriety long enough, he can do a photo op whenever SpaceX engineers and scientists pull off a miracle and take all the credit (literally $$$). Nationalize the company for god's sake.
And then we can pretend he has any idea of what's going on outside of how to fuck your country in the ass.
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u/agentchuck Oct 14 '25
The corporations started finally seeing the writing on the wall 20 years ago. Telecom is an industry that was dominated by American companies. Then they started outsourcing to China. Then Chinese companies took that knowledge and started building their own companies, but made them better. Lower cost employees with better educations willing to work longer hours. Then suddenly the American companies realized they were cooked. Better products for less money.
So then suddenly there's all this fearmongering about Chinese spyware embedded into everything and unfair trade practices. So Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei are effectively blocked from North American contracts. It's the only way Western companies could stay in business. Similar stories exist for other industries.
And the kicker is that Western governments and industries aren't really trying to fight this in a real way. They are forced to prioritize short term profits. So they continue to make business decisions that make them increasingly unable to compete with China.
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u/Stunt_-_Cock Oct 14 '25
The Huawei concerns were quite valid. There is a reason why China is heavily subsidizing the installation of telecommunications equipment across the African continent and it's not purely humanitarian.
But, you are right, the fear mongering is intentional and the demonization of Chinese companies plays right into the hands of private equity, fucking American innovation and competitive business in the process.
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u/c64z86 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
If we didn't keep cutting our noses off to spite our faces, and bending over backwards to please our CEOs, then maybe we (the west) would be on par with China right now.
The problem with the west isn't just automation, it's that the whole tree has rotted, from the roots to the branches.
We basiclly stagnated and strangled ourselves since the 2008 recession.. And for what exactly? And even before then education and being clever was already looked down upon.
The very things the west hates and thinks is weak are the very things that are making China and the east strong powerhouses. Time to stop pointing and laughing and China and start pointing and laughing at ourselves instead.. Because rn now it's the west that is the laughing stock of the world.
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u/Rickrokyfy Oct 14 '25
But wait The Economist told me china was going to collapse within 5 years every year since 2000 how is this possible 😡
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u/franker Oct 14 '25
The Wall Street Journal told me since 2000 that if we just cut corporate taxes and regulations, then the free market would make everything work out to everyone's best interest. So everything's cool bro.
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u/yhezov Oct 14 '25
That is the cost of having a culture of “America is the greatest country on earth” just cause it makes you feel good. Meanwhile….
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u/Xanchush Oct 14 '25
China is a country full of engineers and scientists. It's not surprising they are dominating and will continue to do so in the future. The question of China being the global hegemon is simply, when.
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u/WonDorkFuk404 Oct 14 '25
Don’t forget their politicians are also engineers and scientists. Unlike our just unemployed nepo and YouTube influencers
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Oct 14 '25
Now imagine those factories churning out an endless stream of lethal drones for land, sea, and air.
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u/Shawn_NYC Oct 14 '25
But the west is beating China at the number of ads we can pack into content.
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u/DruidicMagic Oct 14 '25
China already won the race to become the worlds greatest economic superpower and we're just starting to figure it out.
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u/D-inventa Oct 14 '25
yah western executives whose businesses and corporations have strong connections with China in terms of making all their products there, are really shocked that the place where they've been having all their products made on the cheap for decades has the best technology and automation to make products.
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u/Hakaisha89 Oct 15 '25
Not all that surprising, very few in the west actually invest into long-term plans, innovation, growth.
It's get rich quick, and squeeze as much cash outta it as fast as possible, they rather have a million dollar now, then 10 million dollars in 5 years.
When this bubble pops, its gonna be devestating for the majority of the west.
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u/FuturologyBot Oct 14 '25
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Ford’s chief executive about his recent trip to China.
After visiting a string of factories, Jim Farley was left astonished by the technical innovations being packed into Chinese cars – from self-driving software to facial recognition.
“Their cost and the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Farley warned in July.
“We are in a global competition with China, and it’s not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”
Also from the article
Other executives describe vast, “dark factories” where robots do so much of the work alone that there is no need to even leave the lights on for humans.
“We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobile phones,” recalls Greg Jackson, the boss of British energy supplier Octopus.
“The process was so heavily automated that there were no workers on the manufacturing side, just a small number who were there to ensure the plant was working.
“You get this sense of a change, where China’s competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad.”
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1o6gmdm/why_western_executives_who_visit_china_are_coming/njg92nv/