That's the lead in industrial robot installed. That lead is understandable because of manufacturing concentration in China. Here are 10 top robot makers, none of them are Chinese (*), and five are Japanese:

https://manufacturingdigital.com/top10/top-10-industrial-rob...

(*) Kuka was a top German maker who got acquired by Chinese company Midea recently

They also lead the world in EV production on paper, but in practice a large portion of those numbers might be driven by government pressure, not actual demand [1].

I’d personally take this data with a big grain of Goodhart’s law.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/

The graph says "new industrial robots installed", which is a bit misleading. For example the newest BYD factories are still stuffed with German/Japanese robots.

China’s manufacturing lead in a graph

It striking, but says nothing about AI.

Don't they have ten times more people than the next highest country (Japan) though?

What's worse is that this the predictable result of a choice that America made decades ago and continues to make.

Outsourcing manufacturing capacity to China and letting domestic manufacturing skills atrophy and institutional knowledge die out was a choice that many people opposed but were ultimately helpless to stop because the people making the decisions ignored them and did it anyways for personal gain is how we got here.

You'd think that the supply chain shocks that we saw during COVID would be a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

You'd think that Ukraine-Russia war would have been a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

You'd think that the recent failures by the US military in Iran and the depletion of years of missile stockpiles would have been a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

I'm at a loss to explain it. It's like the American oligarchs want to weaken America, or at least are willing to do so if it means that they have greater control over it. Maybe they don't care about manufacturing capacity because they know that America is ultimately a nuclear protected island and that even if things continue to decline they'll be safe to rule it like a king?

[dead]