Keith Bradsher

Because he said, look, this robot can do this 24 hours a day.

The workers are eight hours a day, and it's hard to find workers these days who want to work when it's 95 degrees, welding, which is hot work, in a storefront workshop with no air conditioning.

There is far less hostility to automation than in any other country I know about.

Because right now, there are more factory jobs than there are factory workers.

The total output of these factories is just going up and up and up with exports.

So what you're seeing with automation is often the same number of workers making more and more and more.

And where are all these goods going?

They're going into exports.

They're going to other countries.

So the workers who are losing their jobs because of China's rise in automation are not in China.

They're often in other countries that have not invested as much in the latest automation and in the latest quality control and in the latest inventions.

Germany, for example, is losing close to 10,000 factory jobs a month right now.

And a big, big part of that is the rapid rise of China's exports taking away business from Germany's factories.

And that's an issue in Germany, but that's not an issue for factory workers in China.

The U.S.

is going to have trouble being competitive if it doesn't start investing very heavily as well in factory automation.

There has been some replacement of workers through automation in the car industry in the United States as well.

But the car industry in the United States is an interesting example of how dependent the rest of the world is becoming on China.

How so?

Car factories in the United States now buy a lot of their automation from China.