Chapter 1: How has China emerged stronger during the trade war?
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From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroff. This is The Daily. About a year into Trump's global trade war, China hasn't just survived. It's emerged stronger than ever on the world stage. And that's because after years of careful planning, China has essentially made itself tariff-proof.
Today, my colleague Keith Bradshaw explains how, despite Trump's best efforts, China's robot-powered super factories are taking over the world. It's Tuesday, March 24th. Keith, it's been about one year of tariffs on China, one year of, I think it's fair to say, economic war on China. A crazy year, honestly, which was capped off by a Supreme Court ruling saying many of these tariffs were illegal.
And what we're here to do today is figure out what did the last year amount to? And you are here because you've been covering trade for approximately one billion years. Is that right?
Since 1991, yes. Thank you.
Okay, close to a billion. And so what we want is for you to help us understand what these tariffs have wrought when it comes to China.
These tariffs are changing China's trade in important ways, but not nearly as much as the Trump administration expected. Yes, China's not shipping as much to the United States as it was before. But China's also not buying as much from the United States as it was before.
The overall trade surplus of China, how much its exports exceed, how much it's buying from the rest of the world, is still growing. It became even more immense last year when it reached $1.2 trillion.
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Chapter 2: What strategies did China use to become tariff-proof?
Wow. I mean, this piece of apparatus was enormous. And the elevator automatically dumps the aluminum ingots in a furnace, and that furnace turns them into molten aluminum, that is then poured into precisely the shapes of the various car body components that are needed.
And then those car parts are taken still by human drivers with forklifts, although that will be automated at some point as well, into a very large warehouse from which they then feed the assembly line. The assembly line is 820 robots. It's a so-called dark factory.
Dark factory because humans aren't involved and robots don't need light to function.
That's exactly right. You can turn off the lights, they keep making whatever they're making, and they are assembling all these components together. into the skeleton of the car. Now, some of that you find elsewhere in other car factories elsewhere in the world, but the integration of everything is very impressive. It was also using artificial intelligence.
Cameras were taking lots of pictures of the finished car and comparing them in detail to a database of other cars that were viewed as very well put together. and identifying if there were any flaws that needed to be corrected.
So AI is doing quality control in this case?
AI is doing quality control. AI is involved in tracking practically every step in the process. What you're seeing in China more than any other country is the adaptation of AI to manufacturing.
And how does that compare to what you see in the rest of the world, to the rest of the world's factories?
So other countries are no longer as automated. In fact, Germany, Japan, the United States now have factories that are less automated, that have fewer robots than China. China now has... a higher number of robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers than any of those three countries. China also is installing more factory robots each year now than the entire rest of the world combined.
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Chapter 3: How have tariffs impacted China's trade dynamics?
How did China get here?
The rise of advanced manufacturing in China is a remarkable story. It's not just an economic story. It's also an education story. It's a culture story. It's a demographic story. You have to go back to the mid-2010s. China had really already emerged as the world's number one manufacturing power. But that wasn't all they wanted to do.
They didn't want to just be the manufacturing power that made the most things. They wanted to make the best things, the most advanced technology products.
At the same time, though... The supply of young Chinese workers has peaked and is rapidly dropping thanks to stringent family planning policies.
China was starting to realize that its so-called one-child policy had produced an unintended result.
The policy significantly reduced birth rates, especially in rural areas, the source from which the bulk of China's floating labor population comes.
China had been restricting families from having more than one child. for several decades by then, and the policy had gone too far. The birth rate was collapsing.
As Americans struggle with pink slips, Chinese factories are putting up red signs seeking workers. Right now, there are just too many factories looking for laborers, this recruiter says. The pressure is on to fill spots.
So much of a drop they began worrying, are we going to have enough young people coming into the workforce? And so that put a lot of pressure on China to find ways to get the same work done, particularly at the factories, without having nearly remotely as many workers.
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