Not just automation, but some industrialization, too. I was shocked to watch them build railroads, essentially by hand. One Dutch guy was working the surveying tools, and a translator stood next to him, shouting out the orders. What appeared to be about 30 people straddling railroad rails, lifted up the rails using wood and strap lifts. Hard to explain, but they basically just used a whole lot of people to lay rails.

I asked our fixer what the story was, and it was similar to what's written here. If you want to use a machine, you have to buy the machine from the US. That's expensive, and people in China are cheap. Then you have to pay someone to run the machine, and that person costs 20x what the cheap labor does. Then when the machine breaks, you can't get anything done (and you have to pay someone even more expensive to fix it). When the cheap labor can no longer work, you just replace...them.

He said that the large companies got paid rebates for each person they hired (or something to that effect). It happens in tech, too. Not much in the way of build automation, but lots of people running around datacenters with DVD's and USB sticks.

In short, it keeps people busy and lessens the chance of uprisings (which is a thing in China).