Upgrading China through Automation: Manufacturers, Workers and the Techno-Developmental State
分析了中国地方政府、电子制造商和低技能工人如何看待自动化，发现地方政府将机器人替代工人作为战略核心，制造商夸大机器人作用以获取利益，而低技能工人虽被政策排斥却仍支持自动化，揭示了技术发展主义下国家与资本共生、工人被边缘化的现象。
This article analyses how local states, electronics manufacturers and low-skilled workers perceive and make decisions about automation under China’s techno-developmentalism. Since the early 2010s, local states have made automation – specifically, the substitution of robots for human workers – the linchpin of their techno-developmentalist strategy and set statistical targets to facilitate policy implementation. Although manufacturers realised the limitations of such substitution, most continue to overstate the power of robots in order to receive material and symbolic benefits from local states, which rely on manufacturers to achieve their statistical targets. Meanwhile, most low-skilled workers embrace the state’s vision and see automation as beneficial for national progress, although these workers are the most excluded by state policy. Essentially, China’s techno-developmentalism has led to symbiotic state-capital relations that marginalise low-skilled workers, while reproducing a national sociotechnical imaginary that prioritises abstract notions of technological progress over the actual efficacy of automation, labour protection and social equality.