I first spotted the Chinese name “Haier” on a fridge in an American store about a decade ago. At the time, this seemed a potent symbol of global economic change. When I was a child in 1970s Britain, electrical appliances all tended to carry labels saying “made in Japan”, or “made in Korea” (or, on occasion, made in the US, or Germany).

Since then China has become famous — or infamous — as the factory of the world. The Haier company, whose headquarters are in the city of Qingdao, likes to bill itself as the world’s number-one maker of white goods. With more than $30bn of revenues, it has ousted Whirlpool to become the biggest global producer of home appliances. That “made in China” label, in other words, delivered ferocious success.

Recently, however, I have learnt that there is a second, more unexpected reason why the Haier name is a potent symbol of economic change. A couple of weeks ago, I met Zhang Ruimin, the company’s charismatic chief executive officer, at a Drucker Forum debate in Vienna. As he discussed his corporate strategy, Zhang nonchalantly revealed that the Chinese company had cut its staff by more than 15 per cent in the past couple of years, shedding 10,000 middle managers as well as many ordinary workers.

This is not because of faltering demand for fridges; far from it. Instead, Zhang has been implementing what he likes to call a strategy of “networking” and “zero distance to the consumer”. This essentially means using the internet and other technological tools to cut out layers of human bureaucracy and processes at Haier — as well as thousands of jobs.

I dare say some FT readers will shrug their shoulders at this, given that western companies have been using digital networks to eliminate workers for many years. Whenever I have met executives in the past year, at companies ranging from Rio Tinto to Levi Strauss to Syngenta, they have extolled the benefits of using digitisation to boost “productivity”. Indeed, this trend is now so well entrenched in the western world that analysts at the Oxford Martin business school think 47 per cent of current American jobs could disappear over the next two decades. But the fact that people such as Zhang are now talking about digitisation “efficiencies” in China brings a whole new twist to this trend. After all, the reason those “made in China” labels have become so ubiquitous is that Chinese labour costs have been very low — lower than those of the west.

The crucial point about digitisation is that not only do robots and barcodes perform many functions more cheaply, efficiently and consistently than American workers, they also undercut the cost of humans in China and India. And this has big implications for the global economy. For one thing, it may make it easier for American and European companies to keep industrial processes in the west, instead of exporting them to China.

It may also reduce the number of jobs attached to those “made in China/India/Vietnam” labels, which could change how emerging markets develop in the coming years. “Ever since the industrial revolution, manufacturing has been the key to rapid economic growth. But manufacturing today is not what it used to be,” Dani Rodrik, the Harvard economist, wrote in a blog some months ago. He fears that the emerging markets are now heading for “premature deindustrialisation”. Countries such as India and China can no longer expect to mimic the UK’s industrial revolution, in which a large chunk of the workforce was employed in factories for several decades before the economy matured. Instead, the emerging markets may need to rely on the service sector to employ workers.

Even if Rodrik is correct (and not all economists agree with him), this scenario is not necessarily a disaster. History shows that technology has changed the nature of work before: in the 19th century, for example, the agricultural revolution destroyed millions of farm jobs. But back then new jobs emerged to absorb the workers. And they were in factories.

Something similar may well happen again. Zhang insists that Haier’s former workers are already adapting to industrial change — finding new internet-linked roles as small-scale entrepreneurs, collaborating with Haier or selling services to it. And consultants such as McKinsey and PwC think that digitisation could create millions of new jobs in emerging markets over the next couple of decades. Zhang argues that these new jobs offer far more “creativity” and “freedom” for workers — at least compared with the grind of churning out fridges.

Perhaps so. But the flip side of digitised worker “freedom” is often insecurity — just look at the heated debate around Uber. Either way, if you spot the Haier label in the shops this holiday season, it is worth remembering the changes now embodied in that “made in China” tag. Digitisation is no longer just a western game — even, or especially, with something as humble as a fridge.