The ongoing global technology-driven industrial and platform-based revolution has been variously labelled as Industry 4.0, Intelligent Manufacturing, digitalization, or simply the fourth industrial revolution. At the conference "Intelligent Manufacturing and Work 4.0 - Challenges and Perspectives in China, South-East Asia and Germany", which took place in June 2018 in the Pearl-River Delta in Southeast China, experts from industry, trade unions and academia from Asia, Europe and the United States got together to discuss the different dimensions of automatisation, digitalization and e-commerce, as well as their influence on industrial and service-sector supply chains and the world economy, societies and governments. The impressions of this meeting form the core of this discussion paper "German robots in China and the Alibaba villages", jointly authored by the Shanghai Representative Office and the Indonesia Office of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.