For those of you in China who can access the New York Times, there is an excellent article/video about the growing use of robots in the factories of China, with manufacturers planning on eliminating half of their work force and replacing them with robots.

The article starts with:

"Faced with an acute and worsening shortage of blue-collar workers, China is rushing to develop and deploy a wide variety of robots for use in thousands of factories.

Compounding the labor shortage for China’s manufacturing-intensive economy is that workers are staying in school longer — much longer. And following a Confucian tradition that the educated do not soil their hands with manual labor, graduates overwhelmingly refuse to accept factory work, except in supervisory, design or engineering positions.

So, my understanding of the article is that there is a real shortage of blue colar workers because of the "one child" policy and because they go to university in large numbers, that wages are going up, that manufacturers find using robots to be a cheaper and easier way of doing business than using workers. I feel that if Chinese factories are managed the same way that ESL schools are managed, nobody will care for the workers who are being replaced by robots and this can create a big crisis in China in the next decade. Would be very interested to read comments from the FTs who are familiar with China/live in China.