Kristine Pashim, SCCEI Summer Study Program Participant

Kristine Pashin, Symbolic Systems

The moment that stuck with me most from the SCCEI Summer Study Program was the surprise I experienced when we met with the quietness of the Xiaomi Super Factory (though I recognize it was in the maintenance period). I had imagined a factory that would sound like force, metal and shouting, constant movement and people running from station to station. The actual factory, on the other hand, was almost clinical. It was tidy, neat and quiet, and then we were told about 90 percent of the work in the factory was automated and that number felt obvious everywhere.

Before this program, I knew China’s manufacturing muscle in terms of scale: a huge labor force, industrial capacity, supply chains and speed. But I began to understand that scale is only part of the story when visiting factories like Xiaomi, New Hope Group, Shuanghuan, Lonking and EP Yaying & what struck me even more was the purposefulness of the production. Xiaomi wasn’t simply automating to reduce labor costs, it was within a larger culture of embracing technology. The factory looked like a symbol of an economy wanting to move from being ‘the world’s factory’ to somewhere where manufacturing, robotics, AI and digital governance are mutually reinforcing.

It made me think differently about China’s economic model. In the U.S., automation conversations tend to focus on issues of displacement, risk and ethics. Those questions are important and I still believe they deserve to be taken seriously, but in China, I felt a greater sense of inevitability and urgency around technology adoption. I departed with a feeling that leaders, firms and workers are working in a system that rewards quick action over long periods of indecision. That does not mean there is no tension. The tensions were in fact most interesting…

The most obvious tension for me was the visit to Xiaomi and the Dandelion School. The school made me start thinking more deeply about the role of education in shaping the future workforce. I was surprised at how much a student’s path can be shaped by where they are able to study, when they’re able to go back to their hometowns, and what types of opportunities they can reasonably access. That school visit took on new meaning when we later heard about factories struggling to attract younger workers to blue-collar jobs. I started thinking more about how this was not just education as a social good, but education now has started looking like economic infrastructure. A country’s ability to automate, innovate, and compete depends not only on machines, but on the people who are trained to build, operate, maintain, and improve those machines.

The same theme was also visible at the New Hope Group. Their production system was very, very efficiency and quality oriented. I was so impressed with the way they organized the delivery, 180 trucks for 5,000 stores, and that the milk had to be produced at night and delivered by morning so it could be sold fresh without waste. I realized through their operation that efficiency is not abstract. It is a lived discipline, based on planning, logistics, quality control and a workforce that is willing to reliably execute on a daily basis. The same at EP Yaying where quality was king and at the gear factory where managers openly discussed which human tasks could still be automated and how AI could help turn 2D designs into 3D models.

The program also messed up my ideas about work a little bit, but also opened my eyes a lot. At Lonking, the dormitory system and relatively high factory wages demonstrated how industrial work still offers opportunity, especially for workers sending money home. But at EP Yaying we heard that many of the workers are older because young people often don’t want long hours in factory jobs, even with high youth unemployment. Some choose to be Meituan drivers instead of traditional blue-collar manufacturing. That contradiction opened my eyes to China as a society trying to decide what kind of work the next generation will value, not a monolithic story of labor.

This experience will definitely influence my academic work on technology, policy, and institutions. Writing this at the PEK airport now, I am more persuaded that innovation cannot be understood solely through patents, startups or technological breakthroughs. It has to be looked at from the educational systems, the incentives for workers, the priorities of government, and the cultural attitudes towards effort and change. This will definitely shape my professional thinking about how to build organizations. Whatever I end up doing, whether biotech, law, policy or startups, I’ll be a closer reader of the operational systems behind an idea: who is trained to do it, what incentives they face & how quickly an institution can take on new tools.

I came to China hoping to learn about economic growth, and I am leaving now thinking about education, work ethic, automation and the human choices behind technological change. The quiet of the Xiaomi factory now seems the most obvious symbol of the trip to me, purely showcasing that progress was not always loud or dramatic. Sometimes it looks like a robot, packaging your medicines like the one at Galbot, but powered by a whole system of schools, workers, managers, policies, ambitions that made the motion possible in the first place.