Forbes: The End of China's Manufacturing Industry and the Rebirth of U.S. Industry

People are extremely worried about China's real estate and infrastructure bubbles, but this is only a short-term challenge that China can solve through spending.

The real threat to the Chinese economy is even greater and lasting: the manufacturing bubble.

By providing subsidies, cheap labor, easing policies, and manipulating the renminbi, China has successfully attracted many US companies to relocate their factories to China. However, due to rising labor costs, concerns about government support for intellectual property theft and production time lag, Dow Chemical, Caterpillar, Volkswagen and Ford have decided to relocate some of their production units to the United States.

However, rising labor costs and political pressure are not enough to bring about rapid changes, and a series of rapidly developing and continuously blending technologies will break the status quo.

These technologies include robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, and nanotechnology. These technologies have been slow to develop before, but now they are developing rapidly.

In the next decade, these technologies will usher in further development. The materials and production technologies used in the manufacturing industry will be completely different from the current production processes based on production lines in China and the United States.

Even if Chinese factories are equipped with artificial intelligence robots and 3D printers, they can realize automated production. It takes a lot of raw materials to ship to China, and it is no longer a good idea to assemble the finished products in China before returning them to the United States. The manufacturing industry will once again return to the mainland and the factory will be built in areas close to raw materials or markets.

So there are many reasons why China needs to worry. There is no doubt that manufacturing will return to the United States, not this decade. It is the beginning of the next decade. However, similar jobs lost by the United States will not return: These positions will no longer exist in the future. So what's the new job? We can only guess it.