纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英中国电动汽车行业面临技术工人短缺

Xing Wei graduated from a vocational high school in northeastern China in 2003 and went to work as an electrician in an auto parts factory in the country’s south. The only set of wheels he could afford was a black, three-speed bicycle.

2003年，从中国东北一所职业高中毕业的邢伟（音）来到南方的一家汽车零部件厂担任电气技师。他唯一能买得起的代步工具是一辆黑色三速自行车。

He earned $1,150 a year and shared a sweltering dormitory room with three other workers. “There was air-conditioning, but because we had to pay the electricity ourselves, we basically didn’t turn it on,” Mr. Xing said.

他当时年薪不到1万元，与另外三名工人同住一间闷热的宿舍。“有空调，电费要我们自己出，基本上我们是不开的，”邢伟说。

Two decades later, Mr. Xing, 42, makes close to $60,000 a year. He works as a senior electrician installing industrial robots at electric car factories for Nio, a Chinese automaker. Last winter, he bought a $52,000 Nio ES6 sport utility vehicle.

二十年后，42岁的邢伟年薪接近43万元。他成了一名高级技术员，负责在中国汽车制造商蔚来的电动汽车工厂安装作业机器人。去年冬天，他购入了一辆起价约38万元的蔚来ES6运动型多用途车。

China’s electric vehicle market is the world’s largest and fastest growing. A frenzy of construction and expansion of factories has made electricians and robotics specialists a hot commodity.

中国拥有全世界规模最大、增长最快的电动汽车市场。由于工厂的建设和扩张狂潮，电气技术员和机器人技术专家变成了抢手人才。

“If you want to recruit people with relevant experience, there are relatively few people in this industry,” Mr. Xing said.

“想要招到有相关经验的人，在这个行业里也是比较少的，”邢伟说。

More than 1.5 million people now work at dozens of electric vehicle companies in China and their suppliers. The largest of them, BYD, has 570,000 workers, compared with 610,000 worldwide for Detroit’s Big Three combined.

目前，中国数十家电动车企及其供应商的员工数量超过150万人。其中规模最大的比亚迪有57万名员工，相较之下，底特律三大车企在全球的员工总数为61万人。

As parts of China’s economy slow, Beijing needs to shift workers to sectors that are still growing fast, most notably electric vehicle manufacturing. But Beijing faces a shortfall in vocational training, as well as a surplus of young people with university degrees who aren’t interested in factory work.

在经济放缓的大势之中，中国需要将劳动力转移到仍在快速增长的行业，特别是电动汽车制造业。但其面临的问题包括职业培训的缺乏，而太多拥有大学学历的年轻人对进厂不感兴趣。

Most in demand are skilled technicians and engineers like Mr. Xing. Assembly line workers at automotive plants earn less than half his salary.

用人缺口最大的岗位就是邢伟这样的技术人员和工程师。汽车工厂装配线工人的收入还不到他的一半。

Beijing estimated in 2021 that the country had more than twice as many jobs for skilled technicians as the actual number of qualified workers.

中国在2021年测算得出，全国熟练技工招聘岗位数量是符合资质的工人数量的两倍还多。

A report issued last year by the Shanghai government found that the highest-paid 10 percent of senior factory technicians earned at least $51,000 a year. Workers with these skills change jobs frequently: Before moving to Hefei in central China two years ago to work for Nio, Mr. Xing set up a stamping line in nearby Ningbo for Zeekr, a division of Zhejiang Geely.

上海市政府去年发布的报告显示，收入最高的10%的高级技术员最低年薪达到37.32万元。但掌握这些技术的工人流动性很大：邢伟两年前搬到合肥进入蔚来工作，在此之前，他为浙江吉利旗下品牌极氪在宁波附近的工厂建成了一条冲压生产线。

Fueled by loans from state-owned banks and assistance from municipalities, Chinese automakers are building electric car factories faster than sales are rising, prompting a price war that has left most companies losing money. That has caused a shakeout in the industry. Nio, for example, announced in November that it laid off 10 percent of its employees. None of the cuts were in manufacturing, Nio said.

在国有银行贷款和市政当局拨款的推动下，中国汽车制造商建造电动车厂的速度比汽车本身的销售还要快，所引发的价格战导致绝大多数企业都在亏损。这已经在行业内引发了震动。例如蔚来就在11月宣布裁员10%。蔚来表示此次裁员没有波及制造环节。

“We are already very concerned about the shortage of hands,” said Ji Huaqiang, Nio’s vice president of manufacturing.

“我们已经非常担忧用工短缺的问题，”分管制造的蔚来副总裁纪华强表示。

The seeds of the labor shortage were planted years ago when the Chinese government’s economic planners failed to see the scale of the electric car boom and to train enough workers for it.

用工短缺的种子早在多年前就已埋下，当时中国政府的经济规划者未能预见电动汽车热潮的规模，也没有为此培训足够的工人。

In 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology predicted that the electric car industry would need 1.2 million workers in 2025, and warned that China had only 170,000 people then with the necessary skills.

工信部在2016年发布预测称，到2025年电动汽车行业将需要120万名工人，并对当时中国拥有相关必要技能的人员只有17万做出了提醒。

To be sure, more than two-fifths of the country’s 11 million college graduates each year study topics related to science and engineering. That is double the proportion in the United States, which also has a shortfall of welders, electricians and other industrial workers.

诚然，每年全国1100万名大学毕业生中，有超过五分之二的来自科学与工程相关的专业。这一比例是美国的两倍，美国同样面临焊工、电工和其他产业工人的短缺。

But many of those college graduates aspire to work in white-collar jobs at internet companies and the civil service, not at factories.

但许多大学毕业生都渴望从事互联网企业和政府机关的白领工作，而不是进厂当工人。

For several decades, factories in China could count on a constant flow of farmers’ sons and daughters who arrived in cities and would take practically any job, no matter how dull.

几十年来，中国工厂可以从源源不断来到城市的农民子女中招工，无论工作多么枯燥，他们都不会挑拣。

One of them was Mr. Xing. He was determined as a teenager to leave his hometown, Hongshi, near China’s border with North Korea. He attended a vocational high school, where his teacher said he should look for work in southeastern China, near Hong Kong. As soon as he earned his high school diploma, he packed his bags.

邢伟就是他们中的一员。他十几岁时就下定决心，要离开位于中朝边境附近的家乡红石。在职业高中读书时，老师告诉他应该去中国东南部靠近香港的地方找工作。一拿到高中文凭，他就收拾了行囊。

In Guangzhou, he found a job at a factory that stamped out car body parts for a nearby Honda assembly plant. Whenever new equipment arrived, foreign experts connected it to laptops and made all the decisions on test runs. Mr. Xing understood little.

他在广州一家为附近的本田装配厂冲压车身零件的企业找到了工作。每当运来新设备，外国专家就连上笔记本电脑，在调试中完成所有指示。邢伟几乎什么都不懂。

“I could only look at them like a dummy,” he said.

“我只能像个傻子一样看着他们，”他说。

It left a mark on him. He lived on free cafeteria meals at the factory and saved his pay, $100 a month, to buy a $1,195 IBM laptop. He studied automation on weekends through an adult education program.

这给他留下了深刻的印记。他在工厂的免费食堂吃饭，把每月800元的工资攒下来买了一台约8500元的IBM笔记本电脑。在周末，他通过成人教育课程学习自动化知识。

The training would help set him up for a career in the electric vehicle sector. By 2019, he had bought a nearly 1,100-square-foot condo in an outlying suburb of Ningbo, 800 miles from Guangzhou. Today, his parents are living in the condo while Mr. Xing and his wife and their two sons pay $350 a month to rent a 1,300-square-foot apartment in Hefei.

这些培训为他在电动汽车行业的职业生涯奠定了基础。2019年，他在距广州千里之外的宁波郊区买了套100平米的公寓。如今房子由他的父母居住，而他与妻子和两个儿子住在合肥一处约120平米的公寓，每月租金在2500元左右。

The Chinese government has tried to train a generation of workers like Mr. Xing, with mixed results.

中国政府曾尝试培养出一批像邢伟这样的工人，但结果不尽如人意。

In 2014, Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, exhorted government and Communist Party officials, as well as businesses, to “cultivate hundreds of millions of high-quality laborers and technical and skilled personnel.”

2014年，中国最高领导人习近平要求党政及工商部门要“努力培养数以亿计的高素质劳动者和技术技能人才”。

But that goal has collided with the rising aspirations of Chinese parents who have shown less interest in sending their children to vocational high schools to learn the skills of an electrician, a machinist or another technician.

但这一目标与中国父母对子女的未来期待越来越高是相悖的，他们没那么愿意把孩子送到职高学习电工、机械师或其他工种的技术。

The number of teenagers entering vocational and technical high schools plummeted 25 percent between 2010 and 2021, the year with the most recent data. At the same time, the number of students attending academic high schools barely changed.

2010年至2021年（最新数据公布的年份），进入职业或技术高中的青少年人数暴跌25%。与此同时，就读普通高中的学生人数基本没有变化。

“Factory jobs are often associated with the ‘three D’s’ — dirty, dangerous and demeaning,” said Minhua Ling, an associate professor specializing in China’s vocational education system at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Younger Chinese “find it demeaning,” she said. “Feeling like a machine is not meaningful to them.”

“工厂岗位往往与‘三个D’联系在一起——肮脏(dirty)、危险(dangerous)和低端(demeaning)，”日内瓦高等学院专门研究中国职业教育系统的副教授凌敏华（音）表示。中国的年轻人会觉得“这种工作有失体面”，她说。“感觉把他们变成了没有意义的机器。”

About 60 percent of the Chinese population turning 18 enroll at a university. In 2000, it was 10 percent.

在中国年满18岁的群体中，约有60%的人在大学读书。在2000年，这一比例为10%。

Companies in China have been slower than those in some countries, like Germany, to set up long-term apprentice programs to train future factory floor leaders.

与德国等一些国家相比，中国企业在设立长期学徒项目方面一直比较落后，这些项目旨在为工厂车间培养未来负责人。

“The demand rose so quickly that the education system was caught flat-footed, and it takes a few years to adequately prepare and train top-notch technicians,” said Gerard A. Postiglione, an emeritus professor of higher education research at the University of Hong Kong.

“用工需求增长如此之快，以至于教育系统来不及反应，要充分做好一流技术人员的储备和培训工作需要花上数年时间，”香港大学研究高等教育的名誉教授白杰瑞(Gerard A. Postiglione)说道。

A steepening decline in birthrates adds to the urgency of the challenge.

出生率的急剧下降则让这一挑战变得更加紧迫。

The number of young people turning 18 each year in China has dropped by more than 40 percent since the mid-1980s. Based on the number of babies born in the past few years, the number of 18-year-olds will halve in the coming years.

自上世纪80年代中期以来，中国每年年满18岁年轻人的数量减少了40%以上。按照过去几年公布的新生儿数量，未来几年的18岁人口将会减半。

China, and particularly the electric car industry, is trying to use automation to address its shortage of willing hands.

整个中国都在试图利用自动化来应对劳动力短缺的问题，电动汽车行业尤甚。

According to the International Federation of Robotics, businesses in China installed more industrial robots in 2022 than the rest of the world combined. It exceeded its biggest manufacturing rivals, Japan, the United States, South Korea and Germany.

根据国际机器人联合会的数据，2022年中国企业安装工业机器人的数量超过世界其他国家的总和，比其最大的制造业竞争对手日本、美国、韩国和德国都要多。

By 2027, Nio plans to replace half its managerial positions with artificial intelligence and a third of its factory workers with robots, said Mr. Ji, the company’s vice president of manufacturing. One of Nio’s factories makes 300,000 E.V. motors a year and has a mere 30 workers.

分管制造的蔚来副总裁纪华强表示，公司计划到2027年用人工智能取代三分之一的员工队伍。蔚来有一家工厂年产30万台电动汽车电机，但只有30名工人。

“All of these companies have a hard time to find blue-collar labor,” said Zhou Linlin, the chief executive of Principle Capital, a Shanghai investment firm with stakes in numerous Chinese factories. “That’s why all the companies are looking for automation and robotics solutions.”

“这些公司都很难招到蓝领劳动力，”在许多中国工厂持有股份的上海谱润投资的首席执行官周林林表示。“因此它们都在寻找自动化和机器人的解决方案。”

But robots can make up for only some of China’s growing demand for factory technicians.

但机器人并不能完全满足中国对工厂技术人员日益增长的需求。

Volkswagen is hiring for a new research center near Nio, in Hefei, that will staff 3,000 engineers to develop electric cars, and it is preparing to build electric cars there.

大众汽车正在为合肥蔚来车厂附近的一处新研发中心招人，该中心将雇用3000名工程师进行电动汽车研发，大众也准备在那里生产电动汽车。

That means even more demand for specialists like Mr. Xing, who already has trouble filling his own team of electricians. “We are also constantly recruiting,” he said, “and we are not able to recruit suitable, relevant personnel.”

这意味着对邢伟这种专家的需求会更大，而邢伟已经在为填充自己的技术员团队犯愁了。“现在也是一直在招聘，”他说，“招聘不到合适对口的人。”