Why Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified – Robotics has catapulted Beijing into a dominant position in many industries
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-executives-visit-china-coming-back-terrified/
Why Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified – Robotics has catapulted Beijing into a dominant position in many industries
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-executives-visit-china-coming-back-terrified/
42 Comments
From the article
“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Ford’s chief executive about his recent trip to China.
After visiting a string of factories, Jim Farley was left astonished by the technical innovations being packed into Chinese cars – from self-driving software to facial recognition.
“Their cost and the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Farley warned in July.
“We are in a global competition with China, [and it’s not just EVs](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/06/chinese-carmakers-uk-sales-rocket-tenfold/). And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”
Also from the article
Other executives describe vast, “dark factories” where robots do so much of the work alone that there is no need to even leave the lights on for humans.
“We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobile phones,” recalls Greg Jackson, the boss of British energy supplier Octopus.
“The process was so heavily automated that there were no workers on the manufacturing side, just a small number who were there to ensure the plant was working.
“You get this sense of a change, where China’s competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad.”
I think there are many more reasons than just robotics contributing to China stealing away #1 positions in various industries. If anything if executives are coming back terrified its only because they realize how much further they have to go to cut labor and reduce costs when they’re already razing whats around them as fast as they can and probably can’t keep pace.
Its the problem with focusing on hording wealth and investments consolidation rather than actual reinvestment into people and innovation.
Shit in 2009 I worked for a company that moved some manufacturing from USA to China. Not for the cheap labour but for robots. In China one guy back then could manage 4 robot welders, the widgets in the US took 1 guy 12 minutes to weld, in the China facility 1 guy managed 4 robots. Each robot welding 1 widget in 10 minutes.
The support needed to run the robots came out of Germany, but had emergency teams located in China. If they brought the Robots to USA, if they went down it was 24-48h downtime but in China it was under 6h.
This multiplied across many divisions same number of employees as the US facilities, putting out 7-9 times the quantity of materials while maintaining or exceeding previous benchmarks in quality.
I imagine today that differential has tripled if not more.
Sounds like the Century of Western Humiliation is beginning apace.
China already won the race to become the worlds greatest economic superpower and we’re just starting to figure it out.
Profit at all costs enshitification doesn’t make us competitive. Who knew?
the solution? Fire more skilled people, keep abusing your customers with unnaffordable dog-tier products and invest in more expensive gimmicks.
Chinese companies focused on investments and R&D, western companies focused on “giving money back to shareholders”.
But wait The Economist told me china was going to collapse within 5 years every year since 2000 how is this possible 😡
China’s beating the US at robotics, true, but what’s even crazier is that they’re destroying the USA in decidedly simpler concepts like “electric cars” and “building functional trains in a timely manner.”
These same Western executives want the government/taxpayer to foot the bill for new technology while they and their shareholders reap the profits.
Maybe if we keep subsidising Elon Musk, he can put on some more tech demos of people teleoperating bipeds without any autonomy (I think he’d need a few billion dollars maybe) or he could promise FSD next year for the tenth time running?
How else are you going to enrich him from YOUR taxes?
You know what, let’s put him in more meetings of critical importance. Like recruiting a new head of NASA. He can turn up with his kid around his neck, completely out of his dome on crack and pull the levers of governenment STEM research and production? After all he has no degrees or any other kind of scientific, or engineering training!
Then, if he can feign sobriety long enough, he can do a photo op whenever SpaceX engineers and scientists pull off a miracle and take all the credit (literally $$$). Nationalize the company for god’s sake.
And then we can pretend he has any idea of what’s going on outside of how to fuck your country in the ass.
Unfortunately we are back to where we were in the 70s. Shitty cars that were built to break down to keep the repair shops busy and people having to replace their vehicles every 5 years.
Along came the Japanese imports that were extremely reliable and fuel-efficient, and suddenly domestic brands were struggling. It took 2 decades but reliability and efficiency came close to matching the imports.
Now we are in the same situation…in a few short years the Chinese vehicles (especially EVs) far surpass what the domestic market manufactures, both in technology and at a much lower cost.
Without heavy import restrictions or tariffs, the Chinese brands like BYD, NIO, and others would decimate the domestic manufacturers. And i do not believe they are going to catch up any time soon. Even Tesla is getting it’s ass kicked.
I work in manufacturing rn and it is in such a sorry state in the US. It’s absolutely pathetic. This is what chasing short term profits year after year gets you. We are screwed.
Truth is China is hyper competitive for companies and the US is simply not. That’s why prices are low and features are high in China, capitalism. The US has been captured by large companies who just eat their competition so never have to out compete them.
In the UK we can’t even build a single high speed rail line to the original spec. In the mean time eastern countries are building maglev trains. It’s embarrassing
They also massively prioritized education. Here? Not so much anymore.
The administration marvels over a pile of tariff cash paid by Americans in the “Gelded Age” (think horses) while the rest of the world advances exponentially.
Greed will be the west’s undoing. Unironically the system of having a revolving door of leadership, whether in private enterprise or government (people do a stint then leave/get replaced) has led to the current situation in the US. People in power try to get theirs while they can, future be damned
The only thing keep US car companies alive is our govt not allowing Chinese cars to be sold in the US. When/if they do, it will be a bad bad bad day for domestic auto manufacturing. They know it too…
The corporations started finally seeing the writing on the wall 20 years ago. Telecom is an industry that was dominated by American companies. Then they started outsourcing to China. Then Chinese companies took that knowledge and started building their own companies, but made them better. Lower cost employees with better educations willing to work longer hours. Then suddenly the American companies realized they were cooked. Better products for less money.
So then suddenly there’s all this fearmongering about Chinese spyware embedded into everything and unfair trade practices. So Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei are effectively blocked from North American contracts. It’s the only way Western companies could stay in business. Similar stories exist for other industries.
And the kicker is that Western governments and industries aren’t really trying to fight this in a real way. They are forced to prioritize short term profits. So they continue to make business decisions that make them increasingly unable to compete with China.
But the west is beating China at the number of ads we can pack into content.
That is the cost of having a culture of “America is the greatest country on earth” just cause it makes you feel good. Meanwhile….
Ok people really gotta stfu about “dark factories” Chinese manufacturing is impressive yes they have been the world’s factory for decades.
But trying to tout “dark factories” as a crazy foreign concept is complete crap. Dark factories have existed since the 1980s famously used by Japanese manufactures and the US has used them for decades too, example general electric.
Dark factories have been around for 40+ years in just about every first world country
West became too obsessed with software, which fundamentally doesn’t change much in the real world. Most of it circles back to entertainment, which doesn’t result in more food, houses and medicines. Robots on the other hand can bring a real production, thus giving abundance to the world.
yeah, but we’re bringing coal back. so we’ve got that going for us.
My wife is Taiwanese. We’ll move there to retire at some point. “Maybe China will invade” seems to be less of a concern now that the Confederacy has already invaded the United States. At least China is a *secular* authoritarian state.
I lived and worked as an Engineer in China a few years ago (~8) and I came back to the States and told everyone I know about this. American’s are so deep in the propaganda they can’t see straight. “China bad”… “you drank the CCP koolaid”… etc.
We are going to get completely humbled by them across all industries – no doubt. The Chinese engineering talent makes our teams seem like imbeciles. There is no competition and there is no coming back from the advantage they already have.
Learn Mandarin if you want to speak with your boss in a few years.
We’re dumb, broke and sick here in the United States. Exactly what our billionaire overlords and politicians have been working toward for decades
Oh, yeah? Well – well – we’re going to go back to burning coal! That’ll show them!
Chinese government have their eyes set on 2050. Our government’s eyes are set on 1950. We’re screwed..
so
Thinking about current conflict in Russia, current state of US and China. Do the economic circumstances between US and China make it more or less likely for us to nuke them during a conflict?
Like Russia is clearly well behind the conflict in Ukraine, and clings to this threat of nuclear…at least to this point a hollow threat.
US and China would be in a similar situation, with China having many more resources and longer staying power in any conflict…I’m curious how willing the US would be to use nukes in that situation. I don’t see a lot of potential for future turn around in terms of reversing power structure. China seems well on the path to ‘winning’
Honest question: How curated were their tours? How close is what they saw to everyday reality?
Dont worry, rolling coal and owning libs will surely turn things around!
This truly shouldn’t be surprising. America’s greatest “innovation” over the last 20ish years has been private equity. More than anything America has been focused on maximizing shareholder value by reducing quality, capabilities & increasing fees across all industries. China on the other hand has been investing in growth and grwoth capacity.
While America never needed to and probably shouldn’t have been investing in manufacturing capabilities it 100% needed to invest in SOMETHING that added value — renewables, efficiency, science or something that could scale and be an industry driver. Instead it did none of that and just maximized wealth consolidation.
Quite frankly — anyone paying attention could have seen this coming. When you effectively legalize financial crimes (80s), deregulate finance & decouple financial backing from company performance there’s only 1 result — an economy/country that slowly implodes.
Personally, I think the boat has sailed on the America’s global dominance. I think China has completely surpassed America in all capacties except militarily. I wouldn’t be surprised if China overtakes America as the most important country in the world & most dominant player.
Our children will likely recognize that while us older folks cling to NA superiority long after its factually incorrect.
Yeah, but we are burning coal again, so we got that going for us.
You know what will help? Attacking higher education institutions and defunding science and research. Fucking brilliant.
The US will never compete. We are going in the opposite direction of using highly exploitable people, teaching them nothing, and paying them slave wages.
Fucking embarrassing is what it is. That’s aside from the very predictable outcome of destroying the lives of basically everyone because these people cannot think past the next quarter.
They are also heavily investing in their energy infrastructure to support it and more while we are….going backwards and canceling all of our green energy contracts. Won’t backfire at all
If we didn’t keep cutting our noses off to spite our faces, and bending over backwards to please our CEOs, then maybe we (the west) would be on par with China right now.
The problem with the west isn’t just automation, it’s that the whole tree has rotted, from the roots to the branches.
We basiclly stagnated and strangled ourselves since the 2008 recession.. And for what exactly? And even before then education and being clever was already looked down upon.
The very things the west hates and thinks is weak are the very things that are making China and the east strong powerhouses. Time to stop pointing and laughing and China and start pointing and laughing at ourselves instead.. Because rn now it’s the west that is the laughing stock of the world.
Let’s double down on oil and coal! Who needs clean energy and science when we can blame our problems on brown people?
/s