China, with its eyes trained on "Made in China 2025," has called for help from the international community by asking for advice on robotics through collaborative exploration. This was revealed to be due to a number of factors, including trading prices going high as well as China's population getting older as time went by.
Vice-Premier Liu, He spoke at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Wednesday, highlighting the strides China has made to advance its economy-including opening up to the outside world. He also praised the country's tech programs, according to SCMP. He was also quick to add that, while China had advanced in these programs, the world's best in this field are still ahead of it by miles.
While speaking, the Vice-Premier-who has also become China's top science and technology policymaker-avoided any mention of "Made in China 2025" to avoid intrigue. He veered the topic by calling for cooperation on robotics, stressing that countries needed each other if they wanted to advance on fields as complicated as a future technology.
There lies a reason why China is shifting towards robotics. It all started in 2014 when Chinese president Xi Jinping said that manufacturing sorely needed a "robot revolution." The calls were made after China gained competition in manufacturing from Southeast Asia mainly because of rising prices in labor. Robotics was seen as a solution to providing the efficiency of a group of human workers while also paying for just one robot worker.
Another issue, CNBC pointed out, is China's population. The working age in China is from 15 to 64. Currently, the numbers stand at 998 million workers. Since 2014, it had already started to decline. Studies say that it could decline further by 2050 and drop to 800 million. Hence, the calls for robot workers to shore up the production line.
So far, robotics in China is still at its alpha stages, but the government aims to remedy that by encouraging thinkers-scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors to create and innovate in an equal environment. China is looking at its own flotilla of robotic workers by 2025, with a premium on domestically-manufactured industrial 'bots.'
Already, China's robotic workforce is on the rise. By 2017, robots used in industrial applications were already at 130,000. The government is eyeing 200,000 robots to join the workforce by 2020, and 300,000 by 2025.
