Man vs machine: China’s workforce starting to feel the strain from threat of robotic automation
Around 100 million workers are employed in China’s manufacturing industry, with data from the National Bureau of Statistics showing manufacturing accounted for about 30 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product in the first three quarters of 2018.
As part of its effort to upgrade its manufacturing sector, the Chinese government started a campaign in 2014 with the overall aim gradually replace manual labour with robots, with the heavily industrialised provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong among those introducing the new technology on a massive scale.
