Keith Bradsher

works as a checkout clerk in a corner store.

But they put everything into training their daughter.

And when I first started going every two years to meet that family in 2006, I noticed in seventh grade, she was already doing algebra that was ahead of the algebra in many American schools.

And here she was in a tiny village going to a school for the children of the illiterate, and she did go off to college.

And so the result is a nation of not just high school graduates, but now more than half the young people are college graduates as well.

And the last thing they want to do is a rote job on a factory floor doing the same assembly day after day.

There's also a Confucian tradition that working with your hands is somehow inferior to other forms of work, such as writing.

That tradition has made many families reluctant to see their only child take a factory job, and often their only child shares that reluctance.

So while the manufacturing sector is still growing, is still producing a vast cornucopia of goods, there is a mismatch between

between these vast, numerous factories and a labor force of only children who went to college and are often wary of factory work.

The result, as the 2010s unfolded, was a real anxiety among business leaders and government leaders.

Where were the factory workers of tomorrow going to come from?

And their response was to create a very ambitious program to automate the nation's factories.

China had a plan for this.

China's big on plans.

It's a country that still does five-year plans.

And what happened in 2015 was they did a 10-year plan for good measure, and that was called Made in China 2025.

to make China globally competitive in 10 major sectors, whether it was semiconductors, electric cars, advanced materials like rare earth magnets.

Perhaps most important, China decided it really wanted to move ahead in robotics.

China doesn't want only to be the country that makes advanced products.