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中國：工廠之母 - Angelica Ang
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China doesn’t need a trade deal to win. Here’s what CEOs are missing
China is becoming a ‘factory to the factories,’ powering global manufacturing in places like Southeast Asia even as U.S. trade declines
Angelica Ang, 03/20/26
Trade between the U.S. and China declined by 30% last year, due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs on Chinese goods. Yet “China stepped up to diversify its trading partners, and mostly with emerging economies," said Jeongmin Seong, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the consulting firm’s research arm. (COSTFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES) 工廠照片
China is becoming a “factory to the factories,” ramping up its exports of industrial components like smartphone parts, processors, memory chips and lithium-ion batteries, destined for final assembly in economies like Southeast Asia.
“We may buy fewer ‘Made in China’ goods going forward, but more products will have internal components manufactured in China,” says Jeongmin Seong, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the consulting firm’s research arm.
China’s exports of consumer goods declined by 2% last year, yet exports of intermediate goods rose by 9%.
Trade between the U.S. and China declined by 30% last year, due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs on Chinese goods. Yet “China stepped up to diversify its trading partners, and mostly with emerging economies,” explains Seong, who is also the author of a new MGI report on global trade. Those new trading partners, mostly manufacturing hubs, had more need for cheap machinery and components from China, rather than more costly finished products.
MGI’s report, titled Geopolitics and the Geometry of Global Trade, notes that the U.S. also changed its trading partners last year. The country successfully replaced two-thirds of the goods it previously sourced from China, sourcing smartphones from India and laptops from Southeast Asia.
ASEAN in particular is playing a key role in tariff-induced trade adjustments. Southeast Asian countries were already picking up manufacturing business moving out of China, as companies tried to manage earlier tariffs on Chinese goods and diversify their supply chains in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
Trump’s newest trade war is likely to accelerate the shift to adopt “China plus one” supply chains.
“ASEAN played the role of matchmaker for the global supply chain and kept it from breaking up,” Seong says. “ASEAN’s exports grew about 14%, which is more than two times as fast as the global average.” Notably, Southeast Asia ramped up trade with both China and the U.S., with the ASEAN-China and ASEAN-U.S. trade corridors being two of the world’s fastest growing, according to MGI.
Despite post-”Liberation Day” concerns last year that globalization was dead, global trade hasn’t declined. Seong sees less evidence that countries are moving manufacturing back home or to neighboring countries. “Despite a lot of headlines about onshoring, reshoring and nearshoring—that is not happening at a global scale,” he says. “More countries are getting connected over longer distances, and in that sense, we can argue that globalization is continuing.”
Instead, trade is being reconfigured along geopolitical lines. Countries are trading more with aligned countries, and trading less with countries seen as competitors or rivals. It’s not just the U.S.; China, too, has increased trade with Southeast Asia, Europe, Latin America and Africa as its geopolitical contest with Washington intensifies.
Investment, too, is being configured across geopolitical lines. The U.S. is investing more in its allies; it’s sourcing investment from allies like Japan, South Korea, and the Middle East, particularly in areas like semiconductors. China, on the other hand, is now a net investor overseas, not just because the country is investing more, but also because U.S. investment into the country has dried up.
Last year, the geopolitical distance of foreign direct investment plunged by 13%, while the same metric declined by just 7% in trade, according to MGI. (“Geopolitical distance” is MGI’s metric for measuring how closely two countries are aligned in their foreign policies, politics, and alliances.)
“Money can move faster than physical networks,” Seong explains.
Tariffs may come and go, Seong suggests, but a deeper shift of who trades and invests with whom is likely to endure long after the latest trade war headlines fade. “Geopolitical events like tariffs could be short-term splashes, but structural waves—like the geopolitical realignment we’re seeing—will endure,” he concludes.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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中國的「平台型」市場制度 -- S. A. Yang/A. H. Zhan
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The Rise of the Chinese Platform State
S. Alex Yang/Angela Huyue Zhang, 03/27/26
The West has long viewed China’s innovation system as purely top-down, but the reality is more complicated. The government functions less like a central planner and more like a platform company, structuring markets so that firms compete intensely and strengthen national capabilities.
LONDON/LOS ANGELES – China’s just-concluded “Two Sessions” – the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference – delivered a clear message: technology will be the primary engine of the country’s economic future.
In its 15th Five-Year Plan, the government again highlighted the development of “new quality productive forces,” setting an ambitious goal of positioning China as a global leader in areas like AI, quantum technology, biotech, clean energy, drones, and 6G.
Making sense of China’s technological ambitions, however, requires moving beyond the common perception of its innovation system as driven entirely by top-down state planning. In many of its most dynamic sectors – from electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries to solar and AI – the leading firms are privately owned, with only limited state involvement. Market competition is often so intense, and margins are so thin, that the government has at times intervened to curb what it describes as “excessive competition.”
A more accurate way to describe China’s innovation system is as a state-orchestrated platform. Rather than replacing the market, the government structures it – setting strategic direction, creating experimentation zones, facilitating procurement, coordinating standards, and providing regulatory support. Firms then enter these markets and compete intensely, driving rapid improvement and large-scale deployment.
China’s approach resembles that of a platform company like Nvidia or Apple: the state builds the architecture within which firms compete while also governing interactions across the broader ecosystem. In this model, firm-level profitability is not the primary measure of success. Instead, value accrues at the system level through lower costs, integrated supply chains, faster learning cycles, and the adoption of new technologies, all of which strengthen national capabilities.
This dynamic is already evident in sectors where China has become globally dominant. In solar panels and EVs, fierce competition has often eroded profit margins while bolstering China’s international competitiveness. BYD illustrates the pattern, having recently overtaken Tesla as the world’s largest EV manufacturer despite a domestic price war that has put pressure on its profitability.
The solar industry offers another example. Many firms are struggling financially, yet China now controls more than 80% of the solar-panel supply chain, with intense domestic competition helping to consolidate production and strengthen the country’s global advantage.
AI now appears to be following a similar trajectory. Chinese AI companies, many of which have embraced open-source models, are under significant financial pressure. But open-sourcing also serves a strategic purpose by accelerating the diffusion of AI capabilities and narrowing the gap with leading US labs.
At the same time, the Chinese government is shoring up the broader ecosystem. The National Data Bureau has issued guidelines to promote high-quality training datasets, while the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is advancing a nationwide computing grid to connect and standardize architectures, thereby easing capacity constraints and mitigating the impact of chip shortages.
With physical AI – including autonomous vehicles, robots, and drones – moving from development to deployment, the next phase may prove even more consequential. Because these systems require extensive real-world interaction, data has emerged as the primary bottleneck. As one of us (Zhang) argues in a recent paper, China’s advantage lies in its ability to build a “data flywheel,” whereby deployment generates continuous data streams that, in turn, improve performance and reliability.
Government-backed pilot programs play a key role in this effort, accelerating adoption while facilitating data collection. In 2022, Baidu received China’s first permits for fully driverless commercial robotaxi services. Within three years, Chinese robotaxi firms expanded to more than 20 cities across the country, as well as Middle Eastern and European markets.
Standard-setting has also become an important tool for reducing costs and enabling data interoperability. To coordinate the complex supply chains required for humanoid robots, Chinese authorities have brought together more than 120 companies, academic institutions, and industry groups to develop common standards.
Just as companies like Meta and Alphabet rely on proprietary data as a competitive moat, China is increasingly treating data generated by physical AI as a strategic national asset. New regulations on cross-border transfers of automotive data, finalized earlier this year, impose stricter controls, making it harder for foreign firms to use Chinese data for model training. These rules are already having tangible effects, as Tesla’s rollout of its advanced driver-assistance systems has been delayed despite its large market presence in China.
None of this is to suggest that China’s innovation model is inherently superior. The United States remains more open, more pluralistic, and often more effective at producing technological breakthroughs. China’s approach also carries serious risks, including misguided investments, chronic overcapacity, and widespread inefficiencies.
But the platform power of the Chinese state should not be underestimated. If the ultimate prize is artificial general intelligence – potentially delivering outsize rewards to whoever develops it first – the US may well retain the lead. If value is instead distributed through low-cost deployment, industrial integration, and ecosystem-wide learning, America could end up building the most advanced models and still lose the race to shape the industrial revolution that AI is set to unleash.
S. Alex Yang is Professor of Management Science and Operations at London Business School. He has been writing for PS since 2022.
Angela Huyue Zhang, Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, is the author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism: How the Rise of China Challenges Global Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2021). She has been writing for PS since 2021.
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中國製造業成功的真正關鍵 – Zhang Jun
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Demystifying China’s Manufacturing Success
Zhang Jun, 07/15/25
One might wonder how China has managed to reach the technological frontier in many sectors despite its low per capita GDP, and how it has kept the prices of the cutting-edge technologies it produces very low. In both cases, an important part of the answer is China’s massive scale.
SHANGHAI – Chinese manufacturing has come a long way – and by some measures, it is stronger than ever. Whereas foreign-invested enterprises were the driving force behind China’s manufacturing exports 20 years ago, most of these firms are now leaving China, having lost their market share to domestic competitors. And these dominant Chinese companies are not limited to the low-value-added production of the past. They are global leaders in many high-tech industries, such as semiconductors and electric vehicles, where they hold an absolute price advantage.
Today’s China is reminiscent of Japan and South Korea in their heyday. In the 1970s, Japan was producing high-tech products, including home appliances and automobiles, that outperformed American alternatives. And in the 1990s, South Korea emerged as a powerhouse in the electronics and automobile industries. The difference is that the per capita GDP of Japan in the 1970s and South Korea in the 1990s was approaching half that of the United States, but China’s per capita GDP, in nominal terms, amounts to less than 16% of America’s today ($13,300, compared to $85,800).
The obvious question is how a country with such low per capita GDP has managed to reach the technological frontier in so many sectors. Another, perhaps more interesting question is how China manages to keep the prices of the cutting-edge technologies it produces so low. In both cases, an important part of the answer is China’s massive scale.
If a country with a huge population can deliver high-quality education to its people, it will eventually accumulate disproportionate human capital. Such a country will learn more readily from advanced economies and develop its own innovative capacity earlier in its development. Though China had little trade with the West during the Mao era, it had a large contingent of elites who had studied at Western universities prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic. This group played an extremely important role in advancing China’s scientific research and technology sector, helping to industrialize the economy with technical assistance from the Soviet Union. More importantly, China successfully established a modern basic education system in the 1950s, making it free for all Chinese children despite the country’s high levels of extreme poverty, and also restructured its higher-education system.
Most of China’s prestigious universities at the time had been established by Western religious institutions and missionary groups during the late Qing Dynasty (which ended in 1911) and the early Republic of China period (1911-49). But under Mao, China embraced the Soviet model of higher education, which emphasized vocational and technical training, with a special focus on science and engineering. Unlike the Western model, which emphasized liberal education, the Soviet system aimed to produce specialists with practical qualifications.
Over the last 40 years, China has retained this basic model and made it increasingly accessible. Since the government’s 1999 decision to expand university enrollment, the annual number of university graduates has surged from one million in 1999 to 12 million today, roughly half of whom hold degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. Today, China has nearly five times as many STEM graduates as the US, and seven times as many engineers. This explains why, unlike American consumers, Chinese consumers enjoy effective, affordable, and widely available after-sales and maintenance services on the products they purchase, from electronics to EVs.
China has also seen the value of learning from the West, sending more than six million students to foreign universities over the last 40 years, the majority of whom have returned to China after completing their studies. This has contributed substantially to China’s manufacturing catch-up, especially over the last two decades.
But education was just part of the equation. China’s 1979 decision to allow local firms to establish joint ventures with foreign companies led to technological upgrading in a broad range of sectors. Crucially, as China built up increasingly advanced manufacturing capabilities, it also developed supply chains and supporting infrastructure. Today, China’s manufacturing sector depends on a robust network of suppliers, innovators, manufacturers, and logistics providers.
China’s government has played a vital role in building and nurturing this ecosystem. But, contrary to the prevailing impression in the West, this is not an exclusively – or even primarily – top-down process. China is composed of 31 provinces, around 300 prefecture-level cities, and about 2,800 counties and cities, and at every level, governments compete with one another to promote growth and industrial development. While the central government sets priorities, any policy it introduces to support specific industries functions, in practice, as a horizontal competition policy. This economic strategy – made possible by China’s massive scale – has been essential to the rapid development and continued competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing.
Zhang Jun, Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University, is Director of the China Center for Economic Studies, a Shanghai-based think tank. He’s been writing for PS since 2005.
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