Good post. As to your last point, it was mechanization of agriculture that drove my mother’s grandparents to immigrate to the US.
In a way, it’s splitting hairs, but what has really happened in China since about 1978 is modernization as opposed to automation. They were so far behind in so many areas of manufacturing that automation just doesn’t cover it.
And that modernization destroyed millions of old manufacturing jobs and created millions of new ones, and maybe resulting in net fewer jobs. And for the last few years, since wages have risen in China, they have been losing jobs to even cheaper labor nations like Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and others.