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Communist China is almost invariably an object lesson in what not to do. Murdering some 70 million of your people? Yeah, don’t do that. Destroying as much as three-quarters of your nation’s priceless cultural heritage? Also not high on the list of things to do. Spend decades brutally enforcing a policy that, you belatedly realise, has set your entire country on a fast track to population decline. Definitely don’t do that.
But finding a high-tech solution to fast running out of vital workers? Now, there the Chinese are showing how to keep up economic productivity and vital heavy industry in the face of a declining population without resorting to the Western elites’ preferred approach of importing millions of low-skilled, culturally incompatible, cheap labourers from low-trust, third-world hellholes. It’s not just China, either: several Asian countries are cottoning onto the same solution.
Robots and AI.
That’s right: the very technological advances that we’ve been taught to fear may well be the key to saving our First World living standards, as our populations decline through falling birthrates, without importing the Third World en masse. When the mass immigration shills whine, ‘But who will do the shitty jobs I don’t want to do?’ the answer is: robots. At least, unlike Third World migrants, they’re not likely to run amok with machetes at the local shopping mall.
At DeRucci’s mattress factory in Dongguan, hundreds of jobs once done by human hands are now performed by machines, and faster. A digital dashboard tracks output in real time while a skeleton crew handles what the robots cannot yet manage. The company opened a plant in Indonesia two years ago, where wages run at roughly one-third of Chinese levels. Yet the cost of producing 5,000 mattresses a day is still lower back home in China.
The model is being replicated across factory floors throughout southern China, and the executives overseeing it are pressing their argument with growing confidence: that automation has not just absorbed the loss of cheap labour, but that it has made cheap labour irrelevant.
The pressure driving that argument is both a demographic problem and a severe worker shortage that has troubled China’s leadership for years.
The workforce is shrinking, the birthrate is at a historic low, and younger workers, despite high levels of unemployment, are increasingly reluctant to take up factory work.
Exactly the problems, in other words, faced by most Western countries.
BYD, the electric vehicle giant reshaping global carmaking, rolls out more than 1,000 vehicles a day from lines that are 98 per cent automated. Robotic arms handle stamping, welding, painting and testing. Humans intervene only at the margins. As for job losses: the company employs a million people, with over 120,000 in research and development. When asked why more production is not shifted to lower-wage Indonesia, the answer is plain: the wages may be lower, but the production is less efficient.
China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 – more than half of all robots deployed globally that year. The government has issued an industrial roadmap committing to embed artificial intelligence and advanced robotics across the economy as a direct response to demographic decline. The Pearl River Delta’s dense ecosystem of suppliers, engineers and logistics networks gives it an edge that cheap labour alone cannot match.
Other Asian players are following suit. Hyundai plans to deploy humanoid robots in its factories from 2028 to handle high-risk and repetitive tasks. The machines stand 2.3 metres tall, lift up to 50 kilograms, learn most tasks in a single day and can operate in temperatures from minus 20 to 40 degrees. The company aims to build a factory capable of producing up to 30,000 such robots by 2028.
Those humanoid robots are also an answer to what the immigration fanatics think is their knock-down argument: ‘Who will take care of us, when we’re old?’ Care jobs are tough, unglamorous and low-paid. Let the robots do it.
The contrast with the West could not be starker. For decades our elites responded to falling birthrates and ageing populations by opening the borders to mass low-skilled immigration. The result has been strained housing, fractured social cohesion, welfare costs that never end and a permanent underclass that shows little sign of assimilating. Crime rates in certain imported communities remain stubbornly elevated. Trust in institutions erodes. Yet the same people who lecture us about ‘diversity is our strength’ refuse to confront the data.
Meanwhile, automation is quietly reversing some of the damage of offshoring. In the United States, manufacturers are bringing work back as robots and cheaper domestic energy make labour cost less decisive. Ford has repatriated thousands of jobs. General Electric assembles water heaters in Kentucky rather than chasing ever-cheaper foreign wages. Australian firms are beginning to do the same. Signet, a Brisbane packaging company, brought plastic bag production back from Malaysia after installing a $3 million robotic extruder. Orders now turn around in a day, something Asian competitors cannot match. Turnover has risen and staff numbers have grown.
The lesson is simple. Demographic decline is real. Importing millions of people from incompatible cultures to paper over the cracks is not a solution: it is a surrender. The sensible response is to make the existing population more productive through technology, shorten supply chains, protect intellectual property and keep high-value manufacturing onshore.
China and its neighbours are proving it can be done. Western elites, wedded to open borders and cheap foreign labour for political and corporate gain, are choosing decline instead.
The future belongs to those who adapt with machines, not to those who import replacement populations.
