Businesses in China are now automating entire facilities. (WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images)
By 2017, according to the International Federation of Robotics, China will have more factory robots than any other nation. And there will be more room for automation as the country’s robot-to-worker ratio is low, 30 for every 10,000 employees, compared to 396 in South Korea and 332 in Japan.
China is now going all out to automate its factories, as well as other spaces in the country. Are you serving a 100-course Chinese meal for 20 and can’t make it to the kitchen yourself? China has a robot for that.
Want a video alert when your elderly father falls out of bed and needs immediate help? China has a robot for that, too.
And has your satellite broken down while also running out of fuel? No, China does not now have a robot in space—but it will by 2020.
At first glance, it seems anomalous for China, the land of cheap labor, to replace poor workers with expensive machines. Yet robotization allows for advantages beyond the mere reduction of costs at any one point on the assembly line. “The goal is to integrate the entire process,” said Deng Qiuwei of Shenzhen-based Rapoo Robotics to the South China Morning Post. “We use the robots as a platform to realign the entire production line, not just replace two or three workers.”
Businesses are now automating entire facilities. In May, Shenzhen Evenwin Precision Technology Co. began construction of the first factory in the industrial hub of Dongguan to employ only robots for production tasks. “The use of industrial robots will help the company to reduce the number of front-line workers by at least 90%,” said Evenwin chairman Chen Qixing to the official China Daily. “When all the 1,000 industrial robots are put into operation in the coming months, we will only need to recruit fewer than 200 software technicians and management personnel.”

Factories are replacing workers with robots at a fast clip all over Guangdong province, and not just Dongguan. Guangzhou, the provincial capital, plans to automate more than 80% of the city’s production by 2020.
Guangdong has many reasons to go robot. Apart from the far-sighted desire to upgrade manufacturing, labor shortages have plagued the province’s Pearl River Delta, the world’s largest concentration of factories. Planners, therefore, see $154 billion in new robots for the region. Robotization, spurred by the provincial government’s subsidies, is the answer.
Robots are also the answer for Terry Gou Tai-ming’s Foxconn Technology Group. In 2011, Gou predicted he would be employing a million of them in three years. His company, the world’s largest contract manufacturer, fell far short of that total last year, but it’s adding “Foxbots” at a fast clip.
Foxconn now has a fully robotic factory in Chengdu, and there is no mystery why it wants to ditch humans wherever it can. The company is China’s largest private employer and is automating manufacturing not only because it has difficulty recruiting people.
It has trouble keeping them happy. Foxconn has suffered as workers, made desperate by its extremely efficient but dehumanizing assembly lines, took their lives at its facilities, including the gigantic complex in Guangdong’s Longhua. That in turn affected Foxconn’s public image and therefore relations with its customers, especially the most prominent of them, Apple.