Not sure about that. Labor costs are lower in China and the CCP is strongly incentivized to keep enough jobs around for humans to maintain their own hold on power.
Automation can make sense even with low labor costs if it enables higher volume. Like nobody is paying humans to chisel individual screws by hand, because machines can do it quicker and better, and therefore cheaper.
But you can't substantially increase the volume of last-mile delivery by replacing the human with a robot, because the robot would have to move faster, and moving faster would be dangerous. So robotic automation of low-volume tasks can be expected to happen in high-income countries first.
The Chinese government is also pretty good at finding things for people to do, so I doubt that's a factor. Go to any big park in a city and see how many people are sweeping up leaves, or guarding a building/area that isn't particularly secure.