The Chinese cycle will come for everything. Unless the western world goes hard on industrial automation right now it’s game over. That’s because the China cycle is not going to end when their labor gets more expensive because they’re already massively automating their plants and they already manufacture most of the stuff so it’s an easier change to make.
The Chinese had a big advantage in a lot of young cheap labour. But now the population is aging, the wages are going up and the playing field will level out.
They are also having issues with cheap capital. A lot got misallocated into building too many tower blocks and Xi's people don't seem quite as smart as dealing with it as Deng's were.
Deng was weary but willing to play ball. The generations after wanted to get rich as quick as possible, and lost some of that weariness. Xi now has to find ways dial that back without provoking a backlash or tanking the economy.
A lot of capital also fled, aggressively, to N America. There is a reason why housing in Vancouver is so insane...
Japan went hard on automation as well, but their efforts were stunted in the late 90s by the rise of cheap labor in China along with their massive property bubble popping. Maybe now is a better time for it with AI tech advances, but I can’t help to see history repeating itself.
It's simple, if you have the supply chains already you have more to gain from automation. And as we know from TPS it's easier to automate processes we know how to master manually first.
