Keith Bradsher

There is a product that is more than two-thirds the length of a football field that stamps steel sheets into the shapes for various car body components.

So those huge, highly automated pieces of equipment that are installed in Chinese factories are also being shipped by China in some cases to American factories because the United States doesn't make anything that really is competitive in that category.

That's increasingly true.

There is good Swedish, German, Japanese, and Korean equipment, but a lot of the least expensive equipment these days is made in China.

So China now has a broad lead in a wide range of automation technologies and is determined to hold on to that lead and is continuing to invest in preserving that lead.

Today's factories are much more pleasant to work in than they were even 10 years ago, and certainly much more pleasant than 20 or 30 years ago.

Their ergonomics are better, the noise is less, the air quality is much better.

All of this automation does mean that factory jobs are very attractive jobs if you can get them now.

And the question is going to be whether the U.S.

can catch up enough to be competitive.

And it's a question not just for the United States, but also for Europe, for Japan, for South Korea, and for emerging industrialized economies like Brazil, India...

Mexico and Indonesia.

It's a big question for the whole rest of the world.

What kind of factory jobs will they be able to offer their people?

And how many, yes.

But if you have a lot of production, if you have a large market, automation will gradually erode the total number of jobs, but you end up with different kinds of jobs.

You end up with jobs in designing the robots that make things instead of doing a rote task again and again.

You end up with jobs creating new products and

China has that industrial chain, and the question is whether the U.S., which to some extent had that chain 30 and 40 years ago, can manage to revive it.

It's very hard for American manufacturers to compete at all if they face a constant flood of very low-priced Chinese goods.