Every 76 seconds, an electric vehicle rolls off the highly automated assembly line at Xiaomi’s flagship plant in southeast Beijing, where robots weld car bodies and human presence on the factory floor is almost entirely absent, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
Foreign researchers, functionaries, and German lawmakers visiting the facility are instructed to place stickers over their smartphone camera lenses before boarding golf carts for tours of the production halls.
The state-supported company manufactures electric sports cars and SUVs, exemplifying what Beijing terms new qualitative productive forces—a Leninist doctrinal push encompassing electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Visitors frequently conclude their tours outside the eastern entrance with high-speed test drives along a specially constructed two-and-a-half-kilometer racetrack piloted by professional drivers, according to the same report.
Directly opposite the factory gates, across a six-lane road, stands a contrasting symbol of China’s economic shifts: a recently completed, multi-hundred-meter-wide commercial office complex featuring 14-story buildings that remain entirely vacant. Floor tiles near the glass facades are already cracking and escalators sit locked, reflecting the protracted property crisis that has battered a sector once accounting for a quarter of the nation’s economic output.
Five minutes away in the suburban district of Majuqiao, daily laborer Zhou Zhiwei stands with dozens of other migrant workers before dawn waiting for employment. Majuqiao encapsulates three distinct economic realities existing side by side: the state-sponsored vision of high-tech industrial dominance, the tangible decay of unfinished real estate developments, and the precarious survival of hundreds of millions of low-wage workers.
The Chinese state continues to prioritize technological supremacy to build industrial self-reliance, secure supply chains, and modernize its military forces.
Yet analytical estimates cited by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung indicate that strategic future sectors—including electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and robotics—contribute only about 6.3 percent to China’s total gross domestic product. This output remains insufficient to offset the contraction in the real estate market, weak domestic consumption, and widespread job losses.
Zhou, who helped construct the Xiaomi automobile plant three years ago during interior fit-out work, noted that while job opportunities at the factory offer stable monthly wages of around 8,000 yuan—approximately one thousand euros—applicants must be under fifty years old. At fifty years of age, Zhou is ineligible. Instead, he sorts packages, dismantles restaurant interiors, and carries carpets, though long-term multi-day jobs have largely vanished.
Living in a cramped room measuring a fraction of the building’s upper floor, Zhou pays the equivalent of 75 euros monthly for his quarters while sharing a stone sink with roughly twenty other households. State and party leader Xi Jinping has revived the concept of common prosperity to address the imbalance between private capital and state power while warning against the creation of a welfare state.
Zhou, whose room features a small Chinese Communist Party flag and a bottle of Baijiu liquor, stated he was unfamiliar with the term and placed responsibility for personal income on individual capability rather than government policy.
With China’s population aging rapidly—nearly one in four citizens is now at least sixty years old—demographic pressures are mounting as the working-age population shrinks and fertility rates fall below one child per woman.
Having contributed to a rural social insurance scheme in Henan province for fifteen years, Zhou expects a monthly pension of slightly more than 24 euros upon reaching age sixty. As automated systems and robots increasingly replace manual tasks at street food stalls and construction sites across the country, Zhou contemplates returning to his home province if employment in Beijing dries up entirely.
