Chinese Media Sounds the Alarm on Rise of Robot Tailors in the US"
To paraphrase Clauswitz:
"Trade is just the continuation of Politik by other means"
From HSBC (July 20):
If Harry Reid has been invited to this month’s opening ceremony for
the London Olympiad, organisers would be well advised not to let him
anywhere near the Olympic Flame.
Less than a fortnight before the start of the Games, the Senate
Majority Leader has been in incendiary mood, and has led the
grandstanding by US politicians on the wearing of ‘Made in China’
outfits by American athletes.
“I think they should take all the uniforms, put them in a big pile
and burn them,” Reid ruminated. “I hope they wear nothing but a singlet
that says ‘USA’ on it painted by hand. We have people in America working
in the textile industry who are desperate for jobs.”
If that sounds like a faux sense of outrage on Capitol Hill (Italian
suits, anyone?), it’s in synch with a growing anti-China mood in
presidential campaigning. Topics like offshoring and outsourcing have
been triggering testy exchanges.
But textile tension has also been evident in the Chinese media this
month, on news that “overhead, pick-and-place robots” are being
developed in the United States that could soon pose a threat to the
country’s vast garment industry.
The claim? That a new era of ‘robot tailors’ may make it cheaper to
make clothes in the US rather than shipping them in from China.
The China Youth Daily opted for Cold War imagery in its own
assessment last week, warning of a new “containment strategy” in which
American automatons “seize the commanding heights in a new round of
technological and industrial competition”. Heady stuff. So perhaps it
was just as well that no one at the newspaper seems to have picked up on
the announcement that the company developing the garment robots –
SoftWear Automation from Georgia – has received a $1.2 million grant
from the Pentagon.
The money came from an agency tasked with boosting US national
security, although a more prosaic explanation could be that the
Department of Defense is hoping to save something on a $4 billion yearly
spend on uniforms.
Part of the backdrop to the new interest in robotics is the
persistent increase in Chinese wages, and the likely peaking of the
country’s labour market demographics by 2015.
The upward surge in salaries has continued relentlessly this year. The Wall Street Journal
was reporting this week that pay for migrant workers – usually those on
the factory front line – rose 14.9% in the first half, according to
data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
At current rates, that means China’s private sector manufacturing wages will have doubled from their 2011 levels by 2015....MORE
