If even America can't counterbalance automation (because it just
elected idiots), how is China - that is always far behind - going to do it?

Examine Northern Europe. Is it in a sacred text somewhere that employees must work 40 or 50 hours during 5 days?

If employees cut their hours in half tomorrow with the same pay, we would end unemployment and underemployment by the end of the year, vastly distribute wealth to where it will be spent, increasing consumption and booming all markets.

Elites would like you to think the problem is 'efficiency' and 'productivity' or robots. The actual problem is two fold:

1) Capitalism does not deliver the society's work that needs to be done to the society's citizens that want to work. Profit alone will not solve problems in healthcare, education, and housing.

2) Just as 'work' is not distributed to citizens willing to work, capital always concentrates. The wealth of society needs to be 're'distributed in a variety of manners, as your article suggests.

For the past 50 years the .01% of the U.S. population by wealth have been feasting at the trough. Unfortunately for us, they also control the government through campaign finance, lobbying, and revolving-door patronage. As far as they are concerned, this is Gatsby time; the system works.

Telling unemployed young men living in the inner city in rat-infested housing, adjoining crumbling schools and hospitals, that there are no jobs available for them is a condemnation of Washington Consensus Capitalism. Blaming them for the problem is either stupidity or guilt.

Concerning China, globalization DID generate jobs and wealth in China during the past 30 years. Those gains are diminishing as China's economy matures to focus on domestic consumption. The wealth generated in China DID diminish middle class income in the U.S. But that was because of 1 and 2 above. It did not have to be so. Again, observe Northern Europe. They did business in China before the U.S. arrived. But they distributed the benefits of globalization to their citizens.

The Northern European .01% have moved to the U.S. and Switzerland for their place at the trough.