A conversation at an industrial company in Wuhan gets to the point: German products are returned with a 0.1 percent error rate. Turkish products with 0.5 percent. Chinese products with 3 percent. But the price difference is dramatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201eWe must learn from Japan and Germany. We must achieve mastery,\u201c says the company leader. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That sounds modest \u2013 but it's a strategic statement. China is catching up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From quantity to quality<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n China is currently experiencing a fundamental transformation. The era of cheap mass production is drawing to a close. China's high-tech industry sales rose by 16.1 percent year-on-year in the first two months of 2026. This is not growth through quantity \u2013 this is growth through quality improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Siemens has 60 factories in China. Ten years ago, the machines still came from Germany. Today, Chinese companies are increasingly developing their own systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The consequence for Austria<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Austrian mechanical engineering companies that have built their competitive strength on a quality advantage still have time \u2013 but competition from the Far East is strongly emerging. A company from Wuhan is already producing for Deutsche Bahn (DB) and meets its standards. The Austrian company Scharm\u00fcller is also one of the customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For decades, China copied. Now it innovates. Anyone who doesn't take this seriously underestimates the most important economic shift of our time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chinese switches have a defect rate of 3 percent \u2013 German ones 0.1 percent. But the price is dramatically lower. How<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1421,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Qualit\u00e4t statt Quantit\u00e4t: Chinas Industrie im Wandel - und was das f\u00fcr Europa bedeutet","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[47,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-china-asien","category-kolumne"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/image-15.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2519,"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions\/2519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yanus.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1372"}],"curies":[{"name":"WP","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}