Employment in manufacturing has been dropping all over the world, including in China, for over a decade now.
Peter Drucker, who passed away in 2005, said we shouldn’t expect manufacturing to keep creating jobs like it used to. He told us to get ready for that.
He also thought the economic miracles in developing countries would eventually run out of steam. And he was saying this over 20 years ago.
While manufacturing jobs are going down, the new tech companies popping up aren’t creating as many jobs as manufacturing did back in the day.
China’s economy has been relying on real estate and manufacturing, but that’s hitting its limit.
They’re trying to shift to an economy focused on high-tech companies, but the jobs aren’t showing up like they expected.
That’s why the problems in real estate aren’t getting fixed, and there’s more pressure on the government to jumpstart the economy.
Right now, China is pumping huge amounts of money into its companies to build them up and pushing exports to other countries to keep things going.
But that’s not something they can keep doing forever. Recently, the EU and China have been talking about negotiating against Trump, but the tariffs they’re arguing about come from China’s export push in the first place.
If China doesn’t make big changes to its policies, that meeting probably won’t lead to much. I’m really curious about what China will do next.
South Korea’s in a similar spot.
Manufacturing isn’t bringing in jobs like it used to.
Big companies are grabbing all the super competitive talent, but smaller businesses can’t attract those people, so there’s a growing divide between the big and small players.
Drucker pointed out that manufacturing is already starting to fade as a job creator in national economies.
He said we need to retrain workers to be knowledge workers who can use their know-how in creative ways.
That’s how they’ll step up and help the economy move forward. He also figured companies would shift from a top-down vibe to a more flat, team-based culture.
That’s because you need that kind of setup to bring in creative talent and make it work.
He predicted that as manufacturing stops creating jobs in places like the US and China, protectionism would start showing up more.
And he even said that over time, manufacturing’s ability to generate jobs would drop to something like what we see in agriculture.
So yeah, it’s pretty wild to see how all this is playing out now.