"Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now.
This is China's business plan. The top level is expanded into more detailed plans at lower levels. For example, here's the plan for Fujian province.[3] Further down, here's the transition plan for IPv6.[4]
You can go back and read previous five-year plans. The success rate for the individual goals is reasonably high.
[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0237_5th_Ple...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_five-year_plan
[3] https://ccci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Policy%20Brief...
[4] https://www.cac.gov.cn/2021-07/23/c_1628629122784001.htm
This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MzfNTSk4A
Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success, or just a facade (aka, china would've had success regardless of what those 5 yr plans are)?
Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that??
Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
They’ve also massively overinvested in sectors like real estate
But maybe if Drumpf screws up the US enough, they will be able to weather these problems
Or perhaps AI will get so good it won’t matter
Mostly because it was prompted by decoupling from the last three administrations before going full-bore in this latest Trump admin.
The Americans in charge of the "economy" settled for "leading edge" technology and services.
Robot platforms are already a difficult business model in the private sector. With the exception of robot vacuums the market just isn't viable in the US yet. Best of luck =3
China ironically can end US by simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
[1] https://news.usni.org/2025/03/05/trumps-make-shipbuilding-gr...
What country are you referring to. US with Greenland, and Canada?
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
You have to think outside of this consenting slavery box. Individuals will find meaning in their lives. Volunteering is one. Learning a craft is another. Acquiring knowledge and improving oneself as a person is one too. Americans/westerners keep lecturing about "freedom" but they don't even recognize what real freedom is.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
The more customers I have, the less risk there is if I lose a customer. The less I have to bow to my customers whims.
If one of the 10 people ask me to hire their cousin, I might have to do that. If one of the 1,000 people ask me to do so, probably not.
Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.
I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.
However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.
A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
Because you need manufacturing to win wars, or to be seen by outside great powers that you're in a position of winning wars. You're not winning wars based on git commit messages, but based on the steel any one country is able to produce at a certain moment in time (and to transform it into tanks/armoured vehicles and artillery shells).
There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans.
The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.
Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people.
This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc).
Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists.
1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen.
If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections. Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.
(It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all.
The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity.
Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do?
Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
Robots that can build things already exist and can be purchased second hand, but I haven't see this level of hacking them to self replicate. The logistics of getting enough parts, and having the general purpose ability to diagnose a very wide range of issues with used components, and similar seem to prevent this from being some sort of self replicating singularity.
If such a robot did already have the power to do such self replication, why would it wait for a second hand hacker instead of the builder of the robots using them to produce copies at reduce cost?
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
If you don't want the paranoia, then fix the system which causes people to (correctly) see automation as pure downside.
Meanwhile, the current ruling elite smears him as one of the worst presidents of all time, and has spent decades undoing that legacy and racing towards a repeat of 1929.
American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist".
It's amusing and sad to watch from a distance.
> China's Dominance Playbook, General Purpose Robotics Is The Holy Grail, Robotic Systems Breakdown, Supply Chain Hardships, The West Is Positioned Backward And Covering Their Eyes, China's Clear Path to Full Scale Automation, Call For Action
I closed the page quickly despite the subject matter is something I am interested in. Also the AI generated images that have no raison d'etre of being there.
This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.
Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.
What are you referring to?
I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now).
Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there
[1] https://x.com/slipknothooh/status/1433496026795630598
[2] https://x.com/Liberation_Blk/status/1690911685312126976
[3] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/08/what-does-xi-j...
Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs)
This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.
Is US ever gonna grow out of sore loser mentality or do we really need WWIII?
Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.
I think the decline coincided with the crackdown against cryptocurrency. Had it been allowed to develop normally instead of being suppressed and corrupted (by governments), things might have looked very different.
Now I don't believe the system has any integrity so it makes no sense for me be productive. I actively look for the highest paid, most unproductive jobs I can find... Fortunately, there are MANY of those available in our system.
I've made it my life's mission to exploit the system's flaws, while simultaneously complaining about them. Helping the bad guys self-destruct while earning a living is about as rewarding as it can be for me.
A lot of other people my age are in the same boat, some knowingly, most unknowingly. I hope situation will change soon. There are some signs but it's going to take some big changes.
We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders. If that meant parting out our industrial base to our main geopolitical rival, that's what that meant.
In the US, capitalism has mostly replaced nationalism and patriotism. In China, it augments those things.
In the USA, the state exists to benefit Capitalism.
Also the laber shortage is pushing this transition even faster in potential traditional/ slow areas.
Quoting Wikipedia,
"The prices of most basic commodities and mass-produced goods fell almost continuously; however, nominal wages remained steady, resulting in a pronounced and prolonged rise in real wages, disposable income and savings – essentially giving birth to the middle class. Goods produced by craftsmen, as opposed to in factories, did not decrease in price"
China's system really prioritizes worker and middle class prosperity. Over here in the west we're too busy sliding into a rent seeking oligarchy that we haven't noticed yet.
There are 3 economic blocks dreaming on global dominance: Europe, US and China. The difference among them is how they pursue these dreams.
The Europeans talk, discuss, gather and don't do anything.
The Americans shout, yell, go alone and do everything wrong.
The Chinese just do it, mostly right.
The US capitalists must monopolize all upcoming labor commodities (all-robot) before China does it. Definitely some projection here.
Reading this article I honestly got the opposite impression. China is hopelessly behind Japan in both high end machine tools and robotics.
Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price:
For a site whose readers like to tout the general trend here as being of people with above average intelligence, ignorance and blindness to the obvious is rife.
America definitely seems to be a little bit behind in terms of android manufacturing. They have some pretty competitive robots but they seem more expensive and to be being built inefficiently.
Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup that can build a stack and integrate it into one or more off-the-shelf robots to provide the intelligence part. Because a lot of the demos of android are teleoperated since the AI is still quite difficult.
Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful.
We might be one or two years away from that being practical.
