alt Hacker NewsThe regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything. Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as bespoke. There's no reason this couldn't be done in the EU.
It's going to require a serious cultural shift, but given the right incentive I see no reason why it would be impossible.
> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might need to comply with is time-consuming.
Mind you as others have pointed out, there is still EU electronics. It's just not massive production runs for consumer electronics, much more of it is for defence, aerospace, and medical. And a bit of automotive, although that is definitely going to fall to Chinese car OEMs.