On the cornerstones of the manufacturing industry, from ball bearings to microchips, China still lags behind other countries-and the Communist government is spending billions of dollars to catch up
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A worker operates a machine at a ball bearing factory in Cixi City, Zhejiang Province, China, which has been a center of industrial parts since 1984. China's huge ball bearing business brought in total revenue of 34 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. Photography Wu Hao/The Globe and Mail
More details are as follows• How are ball bearings made? Visual Guide•Video: Different Scenery in Beijing
This is part of the Globe and Mail series in which Beijing reporter Nathan VanderKlippe examines China's current and future challenges before returning to Canada.
In the dim corridor of the Star Ring Bearing Factory, a row of machines is shaping one of the basic components of the industrial age. The steel round doughnut is heated and hardened before passing through the mechanical glove. The mechanical glove grinds, polishes and assembles the outer ring, inner ring and spherical ball into a lightly oiled device, which can be easily rotated with a flick of a finger.
This movement is at the core of the modern world. If there is no way to reduce friction, the movement itself will slow down, followed by manufacturing machines, automobiles, dentist bits, jet engines, heavy cranes, and countless other devices that make progress through easy rotation.
Ball bearings are to the industrial age what microchips are to digitization-for China, which has the world's largest manufacturing industry and the largest automotive market, both are equally important.
They also provided a cautionary tale of how the ambitions of this capital-rich entrepreneurial nation failed on the shoal of basic science. Since the Communist Party came to power, China has produced ball bearings. However, its products occupy the bottom of the market to a large extent and cannot match the reliability and performance of global leaders based in Western countries.
Improving the cornerstones of these innovations is a top priority for China. Its future growth and its ability to withstand competitors such as the United States are in jeopardy.
Washington used sanctions to prohibit companies in the country from buying leading microchip technology. In response, Beijing mobilized all available resources to catch up. In the past year alone, Chinese companies, governments, and investors have invested nearly US$43 billion in semiconductor development. The imperative to conquer microchips is to seek to accomplish what it has failed to do in industry in the digital age: mastering a basic technology.
President Xi Jinping urged China to become a global scientific and technological innovation center. "Only by putting these technologies in our own hands can we ensure economic security, national security, and security in other fields," he wrote in a widely circulated article earlier this year.
Cixi City began to produce ball bearings in 1984. Today, it calls itself China's "Bearing Kingdom" and has 21,000 employees. Ball bearings are a big business in China. In 2019, the industry's total revenue was 34 billion U.S. dollars. The industry has 1,300 large and medium-sized companies with a bearing output of 19.6 billion.
The mainland factory began to produce ball bearings long before the founding of the Communist Party of China. The bearing is such an important component that a factory was opened in Harbin in the north of the country to support the Chinese army fighting the United States in the Korean War. Later, Soviet engineers helped build new manufacturing plants.
Mao Zedong personally approved the construction of a ball bearing factory in Luoyang. This is a very important industrial outpost. Its production line attracted personal visits by the most powerful people in the early Communist Party China, including Chairman Mao.
At the top, the ball bearings pass through Cixi’s production line; at the bottom, a worker operates one of the manufacturing machines. The manufacturing process of a single bearing may take five to six days.
Zhou Yu, chairman of the China Bearing Industry Association, stated in an important speech in December 2020 that ball bearings are China's "national basic strategic industry." However, Mr. Zhou's speech did not praise a cornerstone industry, but lamented its weaknesses. The problems he found included weak research and development, insufficient steel quality and insufficient equipment. He said that now is the time for the industry and the government to work together "from the low end of the global bearing industry chain to the high end".
But Chinese companies usually “do not have the in-depth, in-depth, and in-depth knowledge that I call, and many companies are unwilling to invest in this knowledge because they often don’t see the return,” said Lorenbrandt, University of Toronto Economics Professor of Science, extensively studied the ball bearing industry.
This is a common problem in different areas of the Chinese economy. He said: "There are many other industries that have reached a dead end after they have developed to a certain degree." "In a sense, ball bearings are the foundation."
The seemingly simple visual effect of the ball bearing obscures its complexity. The tolerances for manufacturing defects are measured in billionths of a meter, and the components are made of highly specialized materials. The most precise ball bearings stand at the culmination of metallurgy, industrial design and tribology, friction and wear research.
Even in the basic form, the manufacturing process is surprising. At the Cixi Xinghuan factory, it takes five or six days for a bearing to go through as many as 30 processes. The company produces 90,000 to 100,000 per day. They are priced between 80 cents and 1.20 US dollars and will be used in relatively less demanding applications such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners. "We mainly produce low-end bearings," said production manager Sun Jianhui.
To manufacture first-class bearings, this factory needs to be reimagined as a laboratory. The production lines that are currently open to the outside world need to be replaced with facilities that meet the space age cleaning and dust control standards. "It's very difficult," Mr. Sun said.
The manufacturing process of a single bearing may take five to six days.
It is only in recent years that some Chinese-made ball bearings have reached the strict standards of automotive and aerospace buyers, and for them, a defect can be catastrophic.
One of the successful cases is Paragon Bearing Ltd, which is one of the few companies that manufacture high-end products in Cixi. Its customers include Porsche, Volkswagen and even Boeing.
Nonetheless, General Manager Wang Zili admitted that there is a gap with the Swedish, German and Japanese companies that dominate the industry's top executives. "Just like microchips, device defects are the main problem," he said.
He said that it mainly boils down to money. A standard Chinese-made ball bearing production equipment may cost tens of thousands of dollars. The cost of foreign equipment may be hundreds of times higher. He said: "This is too expensive for us to use, so we look forward to seeing further improvements in the performance of domestic equipment."
But funding is only part of the problem, because Chinese companies' spending in key areas such as research has rivaled their foreign counterparts.
Lu Songze, secretary-general of Cixi Bearing Association, said that in Cixi, it is "normal" for companies to spend 3.5% of their revenue on research and development. “You can even find companies that invest 5% of their budget here,” he said. The Swedish company SKF is one of the leaders in this industry, and it spends 3.1% of its revenue on research and development.
For Chinese manufacturers like the Cixi plant, high-performance bearing steel is difficult to obtain.
Material is also an issue. The Chinese Academy of Sciences warned that China’s lack of high-performance ball bearing steel is a key “bottleneck” for improvement.
For the highest performance steel, “we have not yet found a way to make it completely in accordance with overseas manufacturing methods. Just like in microchips, we have invested a lot of money in research, but we are still a long way from our goal,” said Mr. Lu .
China, the world's largest steel manufacturer, cannot obtain top-quality steel, which illustrates the seriousness of the problem. Ming Xinguo, an industrial engineering and management scholar at Shanghai Jiaotong University, said that although Chinese people and companies are getting richer, in some areas, the gap between domestic and foreign technology is "increasing."
He traced the roots of the country's industrialization path in the past few decades.
About four years ago, with the advent of China’s opening to the outside world, foreign capital poured into its arms—and the desire for foreign products. This damages the fate of state-owned enterprises. As they cut their workforce, the state-backed industry research institutions they once supported have become increasingly scarce of cash.
"More and more people who have been engaged in basic scientific research are embracing the market and turning their attention to engineering projects. Scientific research institutions and teams are beginning to shrink." Professor Ming said.
All of this had perfect economic significance at the time. But "Now, our country may need to reconsider this," he said.
In Cixi, a worker showed off one of the ball bearing parts.
China's ball bearing industry hopes it has a solution. Across the country, industry and government leaders are forging complex partnerships between researchers, public funding agencies and even foreign groups. In Cixi, the Ball Bearing Association cooperated with the local outpost of the Franzevich Institute of Materials Science under the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, hoping to introduce more international expertise. A separate cooperation agreement was reached with a local university.
It is hoped that this partnership can promote improvements in materials and manufacturing, thereby enhancing the entire industry, not just the largest and best industry. "Because our goal is to reach the same level as abroad, companies and governments must work together until that day comes," Mr. Lu said.
Professor Ming said that this approach has its own risks. Local governments are prone to protectionism and competition, which may harm rather than help scientific progress. He prefers the way the central government invests in basic research for use by the private sector. "If the government intervenes too much in the application," he said, "industrial development may be hindered."
The long-term status of China's ball bearings highlights how difficult it is to do this.
Therefore, for now, a country that prides itself on having bullet trains must still rely on foreign ball bearings to maintain operation. "There are many problems," Mr. Lu said, "There are many problems that need to be solved."
The ball starts from the steel wire and the machine cuts it into pieces
Place a wire between the two steel molds
And pressed into a rough sphere, called "raw ball"
The surface of the green ball is not flat when it comes out, and there is excess material called "burr" on its poles and circumference
In a process called "flashing", burrs are removed by passing balls between the grooves of two metal plates, one rotating and the other stationary
The ball is then heat treated, and further ground and polished to a mirror finish
The ball bearing is equipped with a cage to hold the ball between the outer ring and the inner ring. Both sides of the bearing are sealed or shielded to prevent the entry of contaminants
MURAT YÜKSELIR / Globe and Mail,
Source: How it was made; Engineering 360
The ball starts from the steel wire and the machine cuts it into pieces
Place a wire between the two steel molds
And pressed into a rough sphere, called "raw ball"
The surface of the green ball is not flat when it comes out, and there is excess material called "burr" on its poles and circumference
In a process called "flashing", burrs are removed by passing balls between the grooves of two metal plates, one rotating and the other stationary
The ball is then heat treated, and further ground and polished to a mirror finish
The ball bearing is equipped with a cage to hold the ball between the outer ring and the inner ring. Both sides of the bearing are sealed or shielded to prevent the entry of contaminants
MURAT YÜKSELIR / Globe and Mail,
Source: How it was made; Engineering 360
The ball starts from the steel wire and the machine cuts it into pieces
Place a wire between the two steel molds
And pressed into a rough sphere, called "raw ball"
The surface of the green ball is not flat when it comes out, and there is excess material called "burr" on its poles and circumference
The ball is then heat treated, and further ground and polished to a mirror finish
In a process called "flashing", burrs are removed by passing balls between the grooves of two metal plates, one rotating and the other stationary
The ball bearing is equipped with a cage to hold the ball between the outer ring and the inner ring. Both sides of the bearing are sealed or shielded to prevent the entry of contaminants
MURAT YÜKSELIR / Globe and Mail,
Source: How it was made; Engineering 360
Nathan VanderKlippe has been a reporter for the Globe in Beijing since 2013 and has witnessed the formation of China's ambitions and dissatisfaction under the leadership of Xi Jinping. He outlined some key areas of China’s political and economic ambitions, as China also suppressed ethnic minorities and imprisoned two Canadians.
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