Beyond the obvious skilled labor there’s supply chain network, maintenance, townships and supporting system around them.
And all of this needs human labor which is taken from somewhere else. How do you incentivize them? Just throwing money at the problem won’t solve it either. Because more often than not it’ll attract charlatans who will promise the sky, take the money and move away.
The regulatory apparatus has to be rewired.
And then what happens when a new administration comes along 4-8 years down the line and decides to abandon some of those initiatives?
That has its own issues.
Not sure if it's still the case, but the Yangtze River used to be one of the most polluted water bodies on earth.
You're saying it like it's a bad thing.
Wouldn't it be better we have automation in the west, instead of sweat shops in the east?
Robotics automation is a tradeoff to gain efficiency at the expense of flexibility, with a large upfront cost.
I'm not sure exactly what the correct middle ground looks like. I do know that there are signs of a good system.
There can be no bribes in the system. All permits must have a clearly defined fee that is small and clearly covers the inspectors salary and no more. The vast majority of cases when you want to build it should be 30 minutes from applying for the permit to it being granted. The rules are clearly written up and so it isn't hard to look up the law and write up a permit that cannot be refused.
There are only rarely hearings. You have the right to do what you want on your property. If your neighbor doesn't like it for the most part they should have bought your property so you couldn't. You don't however have the right to let pollution escape your property - pollution isn't just things like chemicals, but also noise. In rural areas, or around airports we also give you rights to sun, wind, and airspace - in cities though you don't get to demand your garden isn't shaded. You don't get to tell someone what color to paint to use. You don't get to force any amount of parking (either minimum of maximum). You can't enforce building space (square foot, height). You don't get to tell someone not to run a business. You do get to require fire code such that any fire will not spread to your building, and if you want fire protection (which if you don't have you need to ensure smoke from an accidental fire won't affect the neighbors) the fire department can demand some additional features.
There is probably a lot more, and the above isn't quite correct either, but it at least gives a place to state the debate from.
Of course there are a lot variables in the above. As time goes one automation gets better. You can buy cheap robots for some common operations, and a good engineer with good CAD can run various automated analysis to ensure fit and then export to the robot and build even a single part cheaper than the human - amortizing the cost of the robot over thousands of different single parts made this way. However as the widget gets more complex you reach the point where humans are needed. In some cases you just have humans to take the parts off of one machine and put them into the next, but it is still humans. We can automate even that, but often the robot to do that would cost more than a human for 10 years.