China's battery packs plummet in price again. Hydrogen prices didn't decline and BNEF triples its estimates for future costs. The implications are huge.
Extreme exploitation of labour (and in some cases, outright slavery) is a thing, and Chinese companies are no strangers to doing it. Independent trade unions don’t exist in China and their state sees independent political players as a threat. As a random and recent sample: Chinese maker of battery electric vehicles building a factory in South America - workers were found to have slave-like conditions.
However, Chinese companies are also pursuing automation and robotics very seriously.
The worker conditions in china are definetly shit, but I doubt slavery (and I mean real slavery, like gulags in USSR or cotton plantations in USA) have meaningful share in chineese GDP
In reality, it’s a mix.
Extreme exploitation of labour (and in some cases, outright slavery) is a thing, and Chinese companies are no strangers to doing it. Independent trade unions don’t exist in China and their state sees independent political players as a threat. As a random and recent sample: Chinese maker of battery electric vehicles building a factory in South America - workers were found to have slave-like conditions.
However, Chinese companies are also pursuing automation and robotics very seriously.
The worker conditions in china are definetly shit, but I doubt slavery (and I mean real slavery, like gulags in USSR or cotton plantations in USA) have meaningful share in chineese GDP