Last week Tokyo was teeming with fund managers from around the world eager to establish how Japan will fare as its biggest trading partners square up for a new cold war. The Daiwa Investment Conference provided the venue and the bento lunch boxes; robots, via their human advocates, provided the most convincing part of the answer. Geopolitics, runs an argument that particularly favours a cohort of Japanese companies, is increasingly colliding with labour shortages. If we really are entering a phase where the manufacturing arrangements of companies in the US, China, Japan and elsewhere (South Korea and Taiwan in particular) are impelled to relocate by a new set of deglobalised carrots and sticks, then automation will be everyone’s best bet when it comes to deglobalised donkey-work.
To a significant extent, their slide into this role is already under way: factory automation has always looked like the future, but more so now that cold war-style tensions are forcing a grand reset of manufacturing.
Even before the pandemic, Beijing had been deploying the rhetoric of Made in China 2025 to cover a broad range of efforts to secure greater self-sufficiency in tech and specialist manufacturing. The impetus of that campaign has been accelerated by Covid-19, emerging with a much sharper nationalistic edge.