極速前進3：科技力量

 2025年11月29日 星期六

• 你一到深圳，就是本地人。
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• 很難說哪一項工作更枯燥乏味：是研讀書近平的講話，還是進行電子產品組裝。兩者都令人麻木，但組裝工作帶來的痛苦更大。
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• 美國人期待NASA、大學或研究實驗室的科學家帶來創新。他們為發明的時刻歡呼雀躍：第一塊太陽能電池、第一台個人電腦、第一次飛行。
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• 中國，科技創新則源自於工廠車間，源自於新產品規模化生產。中國在先進技術領域崛起的核心在於其驚人的實踐學習能力和持續改進的創新精神。
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• 比利時漢學家西蒙·萊斯（Simon Leys）的論文集《 無用之殿》（The Hall of Uselessness）  。
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• 中國人對過去的態度》的文章中，萊斯探討了中國建築師的建造技藝。
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• 「永恆不應存在於建築之中，」萊斯寫道，「而應存在於建造者之中。」中國建造者並沒有使用最堅固的材料，而是擁抱短暫，以確保精神設計的永恆性。
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• 工藝知識的傳承。
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• 確保重建神社的知識能夠傳承給 後代。
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• 神道教對精神復興的信仰。
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• 這種儀式為何延續至今？
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• 環保作家江田廣純子親眼目睹了神社第六十二次的重建過程，她聽到一位老人對年輕人說：“ 下次就把這些工作交給你們了。”
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• 江田弘曾寫過一篇題為《每二十年重建一次，使神社永存》的文章。
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• 我敢打賭，用木材建造的伊勢神宮，其壽命將比那些用石頭建造的宏偉金字塔和大教堂更長。
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• 如果日本工匠們為了傳承七世紀寺廟的技藝付出瞭如此巨大的努力，那麼我們又該如何維繫我們所建立的龐大科技文明呢？
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• 我們現代人能否在不遵循工匠們的傳統儀式的情況下，保存製造工藝的知識呢？
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• 美國人的想像力過於專注於工具和藍圖的創造。 英特爾傳奇前CEO安迪·格魯夫在2010年一針見血地指出：美國需要減少對「創造的神話時刻」的關注，而更多地關注 產品的「規模化」。
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• 1993年，老布希總統的首席經濟顧問 邁克爾·博斯金曾戲謔道：“電腦晶片，薯片，有什麼區別？” “美國可能會失去製造業”這一觀點逐漸成為精英階層的共識。
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• 美國的製造業基礎已經從上到下鏽蝕殆盡。為什麼這麼多製造商倒閉了？我認為，部分原因在於金融投資者的文化。
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• 關於通用電氣，一個廣為流傳的觀點是，該公司已被金融體系所掌控。這種觀點在波音公司身上體現得更為明顯。
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• 每關閉一家美國工廠，都意味著生產技能和知識的永久性流失。流水線工人、機械師和產品設計師紛紛失業；他們的供應商和技術顧問也同樣舉步維艱。整個美國工程實踐社群瓦解，留下了被稱為「鐵鏽地帶」的地區。
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• 特斯拉的出現震動了中國電動車市場。中國商界開始用「網路釣魚」來形容特斯拉在中國的所作所為。其理念是，將一家實力強勁的新公司引入國內市場，會促使中國企業加快發展步伐。而事實也的確如此，中國企業迅速提升了自身競爭力。
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• 特斯拉為中國企業帶來的「網路釣魚效應」
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• 深圳立訊精密（蘋果公司的新代工廠之一）創辦人王穎所言，「與鳳凰同飛， 方能造就傑出的鳥兒」。這又是深圳這個資本主義國家為共產黨帶來的另一個教訓：市場競爭往往會降低價格，提高品質。
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• 專注於製造業使中國在與美國的科技競爭中擁有另一項優勢。它可以等待美國科學家完成基礎研究，然後由中國企業接手生產。
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• 過去十年太陽能發電成本的暴跌，與其說是源自美國的強項——科學突破，不如說是源自中國的強項——高效率生產。受益的不僅是氣候，還有中國的國力。
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• 中國之所以能成為 科技超級大國，是因為它推崇流程知識以及維繫這些知識的工程實踐社群。
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• 二十年前，外國公司 為深圳等區域的初期發展播下了種子。如今，中美關係惡化。這是否意味著像深圳這樣的工程技術聚集區將會衰退？答案是肯定的，但這種情況不會持續太久。
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• 習近平堅持要保留製造業。中國共產黨可能是世界上最沉迷於科技的機構。這個工程技術型國家決心在跨國公司撤出之前取得技術領先地位。
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• Gavekal Dragonomics 的研究主管 Andrew Batson）發現，中國工業和資訊化部長在2024年曾誇耀中國擁有「全面」的產業鏈，因為中國  在聯合國劃分的419個工業產品類別中均有生產。這真是典型的中國式誇耀。
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• 工程型國家的本質。它不僅熱衷於建設公共工程，也熱衷於發展製造業。
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• 工程型國家對經濟學家的抵制就像對律師的抵制一樣輕易。經濟學家可能會引用大衛·李嘉圖的比較優勢理論，以此作為允許生產轉移的理由。工程型國家會因此衰落，因為它對失去製造業感到震驚，畢竟從事服務業似乎更酷。
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• 中國想要擁有一切。 中國的政治領導階層長期以來對西方霸權懷有強烈的仇恨，並抱持著一種幻想：如果擁有科學、技術和工業生產，中國就能取得成功。
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• 「四個現代化」——農業現代化、工業現代化、國防現代化和科技現代化。
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• 「產業黨」。他們的觀點可以概括為：民族國家之間殘酷競爭；科技是這場達爾文式競爭的決定性力量；因此，國家必須圍繞科技發展而組織起來。他們出於愛國情懷，認為共產黨是世界上最有能力實現這目標的政治組織。
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• 「感傷黨」
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• 《臨高晨星》的網路小說
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• 劉慈欣的科幻三部曲。  《三體》 是近幾十年來中國最成功的文化輸出之一
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• 一位毛澤東文化大革命的受害者對人類感到極度厭惡，於是邀請外星人征服人類文明；當她的行動被發現後，各國政府只有幾十年的時間來準備應對這場入侵。
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• 《三體》三部曲的道德觀
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• 科學家和工程師是最終的決策者，不給人道主義者、膽小鬼或感傷主義者留下任何空間。
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• 在黑暗森林中被陰險之火照亮的血染金字塔
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• 一個國家失去了工藝知識，另一個國家卻獲得了整個產業。
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• 美國應該發展哪些類型的技術也值得深思。它真的應該全力投入人工智慧、加密貨幣以及其他被共產黨嘲諷為「虛構經濟」的領域嗎？還是應該發展那些早已被美國菁英階層冷落、不受美國投資者青睞的重工業？
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• 一切的起點在於認識到美國科技領域出現了嚴重問題。太多人忽略了製造業的戰略重要性。而解決之道在於重建重視製程知識的工程實踐社群。
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• 提升製造業的各個環節：培訓工人，並激勵製造商重新學習大規模生產。
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• 如果繼續重視科學突破而非大規模生產，美國可能會再次失去整個產業——就像當年發明太陽能光電板卻依賴中國生產一樣。美國喜歡頌揚天才創新者的靈光乍現。
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• 華強北用電腦晶片換口紅
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• 過度投資和對去工業化的堅持，暫時保護了中國，使其免於重蹈美國「鐵鏽地帶」的覆轍。
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• 北京從根本上來說是由一群社會工程師組成的。中國科技實力乃至其全球地位面臨的主要威脅之一，正是幾十年前一項災難性決策的後果──即進行人口改造。

Chapter 3Tech Power

In 1980, Shenzhen was best known for its oysters. For centuries, it was populated by folks who made their living from the sea: pearl fishers, salt farmers, and oyster harvesters. Villagers set cages along the coast where shifting tidal waves brought saline water, warmed by the sun, to meet cool mountain streams, producing mollusks known throughout the region for being especially succulent. That was the past. For three decades, Shenzhen’s waters haven’t produced oysters, their habitat flushed away by industrialization.

Shenzhen was China’s greatest boomtown and, therefore, the world’s. Its population soared from three hundred thousand in 1980 to seven million in 2000 and eighteen million in 2020. For many Chinese, who are intently judged on the region they’re from, Shenzhen was a land of opportunity where no one was a local. One of the city’s slogans, still occasionally found on billboards, reads, “You’re a Shenzhen local the moment you’re here.” It’s a poke at Beijing and Shanghai, cities where older families maintain a certain exclusivity (as they might in Paris or London).

In 1980, when Deng Xiaoping christened Shenzhen a “special economic zone,” the city had little to recommend it other than its location directly abutting British-ruled Hong Kong. Deng wagered that success in Shenzhen could tear down the socialist strictures on China’s economy that the rest of the leadership had been hesitating to dismantle. He lavished the city with supportive policies and penned editorials to beckon the ambitious to move there.

Answering his call were rural folks, who had never enjoyed much economic opportunity, as well as urban residents frustrated by working for rigid state enterprises. These migrants became the shock troops of China’s foray into capitalism. They threw themselves into manufacturing toys, clothing, and other consumer goods in the 1980s, growing their capabilities each year. By the 2000s, Shenzhen was a major electronics hub. The workforce would become the spearhead for the greatest business endeavor of the early twentieth century: the campaign to put a smartphone into the hands of nearly everyone on the planet.

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, there was no more natural place than Shenzhen for mass production. It had already scaled up manufacturing of the iPod there a few years earlier. Apple decided that Shenzhen was the city to make the boldest product that Jobs had conceived.

The iPhone has become one of the rarest sorts of consumer products—both ubiquitous and coveted as a status object. It is also the crowning success of the trade relationship between two countries, in which American inspiration and marketing savvy met China’s millions of workers, managed by contract manufacturers like Taiwan’s Foxconn, to make state-of-the-art electronics. It wasn’t easy to organize a workforce to assemble thousands of components into the most complex consumer product the world has ever known. Mastering this feat propelled Apple to become the first trillion-dollar company.

China, if anything, gained something even greater from this partnership. While the company enjoyed a surge in valuation, the country experienced a boost in national power, produced by the international collaboration needed to train hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, every year, to build sophisticated electronics. Chinese companies subsequently leveraged this workforce to lead the world in other industries centered in Shenzhen, including electric vehicles, battery systems, and consumer drones.

As China did so, it embraced a vision of technology radically different from Silicon Valley’s: the pursuit of physical and industrial technologies rather than virtual ones like social media or e-commerce platforms. In China, technology is not represented by shiny objects; rather, it is embodied by communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen, where technology lives inside the heads and in the hands of its workforce. This chapter reveals how a city climbed a technological ladder, making shirts and toys in the 1980s to making the world’s most sophisticated electronics three decades later.

China, as I said in my introduction, is often messy. But in some places, it is spick-and-span. The most orderly places I’ve been to in the country are the manufacturing sites producing for Apple. Every worker is in place at all times. You can tell a worker’s rank by their uniform: A line manager might, for example, wear green among assembly workers wearing blue. Women and men with longer hair wear hairnets. Workers are not allowed to cross into assembly lines making products for other companies. At the end of the workday, they pass through perhaps a half dozen scanners to make sure they haven’t pocketed any products. A wave of people exit cafeterias or enter dormitories at designated times. Shuttles bring workers to the restaurants or karaoke spaces where they can, at last, be unregimented.

It’s easy to get lost in factory zones because so many of the buildings look the same. The iPhone turbocharged factory complexes to enormous scale: Foxconn’s manufacturing campus in the north of Shenzhen occupies five hundred acres. The site has factories, of course, and dormitories. It also has grocery stores, cafés, a fire brigade, a hospital, cinemas, swimming pools, and vendor-operated restaurants. The factory is the size of a city. The population peaks in early fall as production ramps up to meet demand for the Christmas season. Dormitories fill up then, with up to six men or women crammed into one room. Assembly lines operate for three eight-hour shifts a day; there is never a minute that factories aren’t producing iPhones. At the peak times, three hundred thousand people work at Foxconn’s Shenzhen campus, about as many as live in Pittsburgh or St. Louis. A Chinese report from 2009 estimated that the campus each day consumed forty tons of rice, twenty tons of pork, ten tons of flour, and five hundred barrels of cooking oil.

In 2020, Foxconn employed nearly a cool million workers globally. As iPhone production swung into full gear a decade ago in Shenzhen, workers might have seen someone zooming around the campus on a golf cart. That would be Terry Gou, founder of Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry). Gou might start the day by doing laps in the company pool and then drive his own golf cart, specially equipped with a bicycle bell, around the facility until late at night to monitor production. He is legendary in his native Taiwan for his dedication to work. Gou aggressively courted American companies like Dell and Apple to win contracts for manufacturing their products, earning their trust by guarding technical secrets and making products on time, at high quality, in massive volume.

Terry Gou also has a whimsical side. In 2019, he said that the Buddhist goddess of the sea visited him in a dream to say that he should run for president of Taiwan. In his party’s primary election that year, he finished in second place.

Gou set up the officially accredited Foxconn University on the Shenzhen campus, offering twenty-five majors, most of which were engineering related. Gou surrounded himself with deputies who worked nearly as relentlessly as he did, driving Foxconn executives to the factories six days a week and then to study sessions on Sundays. In earlier years, they studied engineering principles. One former employee told me that in more recent years, political education has been more prominent, meaning that they have to study the words of China’s top leader. The curriculum transitioned from “Steve Jobs thought” when Shenzhen was freewheeling a decade ago to “Xi Jinping thought” in the more disciplined present.

At the best of times, electronics assembly is overwhelmingly repetitive. Managers prize workers with daintier fingers, favoring women because they are presumed to be nimbler. When I asked factory overseers why iPhones are not made in the United States, they always bring up fingers. “Look at those meaty American hands,” Taiwanese managers tell me. “How can they possibly put together something as intricate as an iPhone?”

It’s hard to say what was more repetitive: studying Xi’s speeches or doing electronics assembly. Both are mind numbing, but assembly work caused greater suffering. We would know far less about Foxconn if over a dozen workers in Shenzhen had not attempted suicide by jumping from factory dormitories in 2010. This tragedy forced Foxconn and Apple into crisis management mode. The press-avoidant Gou invited a few Western journalists to tour sections of the campus, which was subsequently lined with three million square meters of mesh netting woven around dormitories to prevent more deaths.

As iPhone sales started to explode, Foxconn faced a constant hunger for workers. Soon enough, it had outgrown Shenzhen. Rather than wait for migrant workers to move to Shenzhen, Gou decided to move Foxconn to the biggest suppliers of workers. Factories sprang up in China’s most populous regions: Sichuan and Chongqing in the southwest, the eastern provinces around Shanghai, and the northern province of Henan. These regions remain major production sites for Apple, the biggest of which is in Henan’s capital city of Zhengzhou. At peak season, Zhengzhou has the capacity to employ around 350,000 people.

Chinese officials climbed over each other to host a Foxconn facility. They salivated at the number of jobs and amount of tax revenues the company could create for their jurisdiction, which could elevate them to higher office. Local officials promised to satisfy Foxconn’s extraordinary labor demands. In Chengdu, minor bureaucrats had to hit quotas on the number of workers to rustle up for factory work; those who failed might receive an order to work at assembly lines themselves. One Chengdu official who failed her quota received not just that work assignment but also cruel teasing from her more successful colleagues: “Don’t leap off any buildings while you’re there,” someone told her.

Officials in Henan outdid themselves in hustling workers into factories. In 2016, Henan officials “borrowed” workers from state-owned coal companies to meet the iPhone production surge. In 2017, the Financial Times reported that up to three thousand high school students had to work on assembly lines—a few of them for eleven-hour days—and if they did not, their school withheld their graduation diplomas. They were euphemistically called “interns” who assembled iPhones for “vocational experience.” In 2022, when Covid controls snarled supply chains, they recruited retired People’s Liberation Army personnel to staff production lines. It was at Foxconn’s Henan sites where some of the most dramatic protests against zero-Covid took place, when young men flung bricks into massed ranks of riot police.

Helen Wang (no relation) had been a Foxconn executive working in California in the early 2000s when Apple poached her to be a procurement leader. She would eventually work sourcing components for the first iPhone. In an interview, Helen told me that her first thought on receiving an assignment was often, “I need to build a city.” Construction of this scale was something that Apple, Foxconn, and government officials did together. Helen told me that Shenzhen conducted leveling operations along mountains to make land suitable for production. Another former Apple engineer told me that a grassy field had turned, four months later on his next visit from Cupertino, into an industrial building with six floors getting ready to install equipment. Local officials in Shenzhen, Sichuan, and Henan not only collaborated to find labor. They also offered cheap land, extended vast tax rebates, and built roads, dormitories, and factories. The central government pitched in to help too, creating “bonded zones,” which facilitated customs clearance. The state worked closely with the companies to move workers and components into factories and finished products out.

Deng Xiaoping, with the help of other reformist leaders, made Shenzhen into a hothouse of capitalism. What does capitalism need? A stock market, which Shenzhen established in 1990. What else? Belching factories with dismal labor conditions. That it had aplenty. Walmart invested deeply in that region to source goods: socks, toys, lighting, and nearly anything else that consumers wanted in a supercenter. In 2002, Walmart moved its global purchasing center from Hong Kong, a financial hub, to Shenzhen, which was closer to the factories. By that point, Shenzhen’s factories had started to produce goods more sophisticated than socks. They had become proficient at developing all sorts of electronics components: small batteries, cable connectors, and display screens.

Explosive growth had costs: the oysters, for example, which could no longer live in the marine environments that the factories had spoiled. Walmart, Foxconn, and many other multinational companies have been accused of dreadful labor standards. Shenzhen built new buildings in too great haste. The government fretted about buildings that had “five lacks,” that is, no design, drawings, permits, supervised construction, or official registration. The result, reported by the Shenzhen Commercial Daily, was that one-eighth of rural buildings completed in 1983 suffered major structural problems, sometimes including collapse.

I took frequent trips to Shenzhen when I lived in Hong Kong. You could get there via a sea ferry, which offered pleasant views, or, more conveniently, on the subway line that connects the two cities. Today, Shenzhen is one of China’s most desirable places to live, gleaming with skyscrapers and malls and full of big trees. But new construction has not obliterated the city’s past. Threaded between big avenues are bustling pockets of semi-preserved village structures that imbue the city with more liveliness than glass skyscrapers are able to provide. After business meetings, I would enter alleyways to find these urban villages, which have little textile workshops operating during the day and small joints serving griddles of seafood with fridges full of beer at night.

The center of Shenzhen is the Huaqiangbei mall complex. It is a giant bazaar spread across several buildings, with stalls filled not with spices or silks but wholesale electronics. Each storefront is usually made up of a brightly lit sign hanging above transparent plastic bins in which wires, specialized semiconductors, adapters, capacitors, and any electronic part imaginable can be scooped up by the armload. They buzz with the noise of activity. Clamor drifts up from the hubbub of people negotiating bulk orders, completed with the shriek that comes from ripping the packing tape that closes a box and seals the deal.

On my first visit to Huaqiangbei, I walked through the hundreds of vendors in the mall complex, when a phone case with a whale printed on it caught my eye. I decided it would be fun to carry around a reminder of Moby-Dick. When I went to buy the phone case, the owner was slightly taken aback that I wanted only one. “Usually, we take orders by the hundreds.” It took him a moment to switch systems on his computer to accommodate my modest purchase.

Shenzhen and the surrounding cities (Guangzhou, Dongguan, Zhuhai, and a half dozen others) altogether equal the population of Germany. The area is not without its charms. Hong Kong is breathtaking with its mix of mountains and skyscrapers, while Guangzhou has marvelous temples and big villas. It’s useful, however, to appreciate this region as a giant industrial complex, especially for making electronics. Drive out of downtown Shenzhen and that’s easy to see. Along dusty roads, you will find factories, warehouses, and tooling shops, which are rarely beautiful and mostly drab.

It’s fully appropriate to call Shenzhen the “Silicon Valley of hardware.” As in the stretch from Palo Alto to San Jose, Shenzhen is full of boring office parks along highways in a beautiful natural setting. And friends would tell me that Shenzhen, as in Silicon Valley, is a great place to found a start-up. A group of people would discuss an idea over dinner, divide up the tasks, and get to work the next morning. By contrast, in Beijing, dinner will feature interminable rounds of liquor shots, reckless bluffs about connections in high places, and uncertain follow-up afterward.

It wasn’t simply Apple dreaming up new ideas for its manufacturers to execute. Rather, it was a collaborative process between Cupertino and Shenzhen. “[Apple products are] not designed and sent over. That sounds like there’s no interaction,” Apple CEO Tim Cook once told an interviewer. The idea of having something designed in California and manufactured elsewhere “requires a kind of hand-in-glove partnership.” In 2019, United Airlines made a promotional banner about how valuable Apple was to its business. United wrote that Apple booked fifty business-class seats daily from San Francisco to Shanghai, from which the airline made $35 million each year. That’s over eighteen thousand business-class seats on one route.

The several dozen manufacturing sites that Apple has around the world are all meant to produce at exactly the same level of quality. That’s why Apple kept sending engineering managers from Cupertino and demanding they camp out in factories in Shenzhen or elsewhere in Asia and not come back until they had solved production issues. This demand for consistency helps to explain why the factories I visited felt so regimented: The production lines were intensely hierarchical, as extensively planned out as if they were military. It’s no wonder that Foxconn’s formal name is Hon Hai Precision Industry.

A 2012 story in the New York Times reported that Apple needed to hire nearly nine thousand industrial engineers in the earlier days of iPhone production. The company’s analysts expected recruitment to last nine months to hire that many engineers in the United States. In China, they were able to do it in two weeks. A large pool of good labor increases the speed of design and production cycles. As Tim Cook once said, “In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”

Apple and Foxconn found an advantage in Shenzhen beyond workers who could meet their quality standards: The dense network of factories also offered flexibility on manufacturing techniques. One of the former Apple engineers I spoke to pointed out that any feature changes create unpredictable demands. Each year, Apple might have a pretty good sense of where most valuable iPhone components are coming from (the camera module, for example, from Sony; the memory from Samsung; its chips made by TSMC), but there are constant surprises further down the supply chain. “There are always new components or processes that a new design requires, like a certain type of adhesive or a screw of a slightly different size.”

Therefore, Apple constantly had to scramble to find suppliers on short notice. “Almost always,” the engineer continued, “we found someone in Shenzhen by asking a guy who knows a guy whose cousin might be able to produce a few hundred thousand new screws.”

Virtually everything one needs to produce any electronic product can be found in a short drive around Shenzhen. Proximity creates efficiency. When it’s time to do stuff, a company can collapse coordination that usually takes weeks into a business meeting lasting hours by convening all the relevant suppliers in one room the next morning. And if something goes wrong, there are a lot of friendly neighboring factories to call. “If you have a gas leak,” an American hardware entrepreneur told me, “you can go borrow a neighbor’s kit and give it back the next day.”

Workers in Shenzhen gained skills by assembling smartphones, music players, and other electronics. It didn’t take long for some engineers and line managers to rummage around the plastic bins of Huaqiangbei, wondering what they could do with these parts. These components were getting better every year, part of a trend that Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, called “the peace dividends of the smartphone wars.” The hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the smartphone supply chain have caused the cost of electronic components—cameras, sensors, batteries, modems—to plummet. That’s why we’re able to carry around sensors in our pockets that used to be available to only a select few military powers.

Many companies have grown around this peace dividend. Indeed, Shenzhen is the headquarters of many of China’s most dynamic companies, including BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker; DJI, the world’s largest consumer drone maker; and Huawei, the beleaguered company that is the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker. Electric vehicles are full of the electronic components borrowed from smartphones; the consumer drone is roughly a reassembly of a smartphone camera and sensor with propellers for flight.

The magic of Shenzhen is the combination of the world’s most creative hardware engineers sitting in a sea of components that improve every year amid a labor force of millions who know how to put together electronics. This buzzing ecosystem has produced many other products that follow in Apple’s wake, like hoverboards, electric scooters, virtual reality headsets, and who knows what’s next?

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When I moved to China in 2017 to cover technology, it was still common to hear Americans say that Chinese companies couldn’t innovate. China could only copy and steal, they said. Some folks in Silicon Valley knew that there were cool things cooking in Shenzhen, but the broader attitude among Americans was condescension.

When I left China in 2023, the tenor of American views had shifted. Fewer people were saying China hasn’t developed any important technologies, since it has become a major producer of electric vehicles and clean technologies. Alarm has crowded out the dismissiveness, as China’s surveillance capabilities are menacing US national security while its manufacturing capacity is threatening to engulf Western firms.

We are still not appreciating the communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen, and at no point has there been real curiosity about how China’s technological capabilities have developed.

The iPhone embodies China’s steady technological ascension. In 2007, Apple imported nearly all of the high-valued components—display screen glass from the United States, camera modules from Japan, memory chips from South Korea, sensors from Germany—to Shenzhen. China’s contribution consisted mostly of the labor involved in assembling foreign products, which was around 4 percent of the phone’s final value. One former Apple executive told me that the iPhone supply chain grew more “red” over the next decade as it incorporated domestically produced components—meaning that it incorporated more Chinese components. By the time that the iPhone X was released in 2017, Chinese firms were making acoustic parts, charging modules, and battery packs. According to a teardown analysis, China’s contribution to the iPhone X reached around 25 percent of the final value of the phone.

In the 2010s, China produced the digital platforms that Americans have associated with real technological innovation. In 2017, tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent brawled with each other, as well as with up-and-coming firms like ByteDance, for the billion Chinese users who were getting online. E-commerce companies like Alibaba held ludicrously fun sale bonanzas, hiring Taylor Swift to perform a concert in Shanghai to drive a buying frenzy. Chinese consumers were some of the most eager adopters of online retail in the world; since they live in dense cities with superb logistics networks, platforms were able to deliver goods rapidly. People skipped several steps in Western habits, dispensing with personal computers, email, and credit cards so that they could manage their lives on their smartphones, especially through Tencent’s WeChat app. In 2017, TikTok was gaining traction, and China looked like it might be strong on AI and maybe dominate Bitcoin too, given that most of the world’s mining servers were there.

A few years later Xi Jinping kneecapped most of China’s digital platforms. Xi prefers his industry heavy and his output hard. He scorned the virtual economy, denouncing the “barbaric growth” of capital and focusing instead on industrial developments. That meant throwing everything into manufacturing. Though it remains several steps behind the West in a few critical industries, especially semiconductors and aviation, Chinese manufacturing has caught up in most other fields.

China leads the world in deploying ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines, high-speed rail, and 5G networks. Chinese manufacturers make machine tools—die-casting machines, steel presses, robotic arms—that approach German and Japanese levels of quality. They’ve muscled out most other Asian competitors on consumer electronics. Phone makers like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi tapped into the worker and component ecosystem that Apple helped to build. In 2025, the world’s largest phone makers are Apple, Samsung, and a half dozen Chinese firms that concentrate on sales to developing countries.

Chinese brands are not only making many of the lowest-end consumer goods (the junk found on e-commerce apps) but also higher-end kitchen products and audio equipment. It’s fair to say, however, that although Chinese workers make so much stuff, few Chinese companies have established striking global brands. They’re far behind Japanese companies, which, starting in the 1970s, created whole new categories of products, like music players, game consoles, digital cameras, and pocket calculators, that excited global consumers. For the most part, Chinese successes involve making good products cheaply. But I think it’s likely that they will be known for great products too. Branding tends to follow good quality, and I expect Chinese brands to be well regarded over the next decade, just as the perception of “Made in Japan” flipped from shoddy to valuable.

China’s clearest industrial success involves clean technology, or the renewable power equipment that we need to decarbonize our economies. In 2025, Chinese firms dominate every segment of the solar value chain, make most of the large-capacity batteries that power electric vehicles, and have commanding positions in wind turbines and hydrogen electrolyzers.

China remains weak in several industries, however. The leadership is sore that the country remains dependent on the West for aircraft engines and semiconductor technologies. And though China’s biotech industry is big, Chinese pharmaceuticals haven’t yet produced a blockbuster new drug or vaccine. Not often do its universities generate groundbreaking new papers that force American scientists to sit up and pay attention.

The fact is that China remains fairly weak at producing scientific advancements. Whereas Japanese researchers have earned more than twenty Nobel Prizes in the sciences, only one has ever been awarded to a Chinese national. Now the state is dedicating enormous resources to pursuing better science. In 2019, China became the first country to land a rover on the far side of the moon; a year later, Chinese scientists achieved quantum-encrypted communication by satellite. Its space agency has announced that it will land people on the moon by 2030. That’s hardly outdoing the United States in space, which landed astronauts on the moon six decades before China’s target. But it is a sign that China is steadily investing in scientific capabilities that give it the power to achieve increasingly difficult tasks.

It’s another of the ways that the United States and China are inversions of each other. Americans expect innovations from scientists working at NASA, in universities, or in research labs. They celebrate the moment of invention: the first solar cell, the first personal computer, first in flight. In China, on the other hand, tech innovation emerges from the factory floor, when a new product is scaled up into mass production. At the heart of China’s ascendancy in advanced technology is its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things.

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When we talk about technology, we should really distinguish between three things. First, technology means tools. These are the pots, pans, knives, and ovens required to prepare a dish. Second, technology means explicit instruction. These are the recipes, the blueprints, the patents that can be written down. Third and most important, technology is process knowledge. That is the proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated. Ask someone who has never cooked before to do something as simple as fry an egg. Give him a beautiful kitchen and the most exquisitely detailed recipe, and he might still make a mess.

We can see how China values process knowledge through its approach to architecture too. That reveals something deeper and more interesting about its culture. One of my favorite books about China is a collection of essays called The Hall of Uselessness by the Belgian sinologist Simon Leys. In one of these essays, “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past,” Leys considers the construction techniques of Chinese builders.

Builders everywhere have attempted to overcome the erosion of time. Ancient Egypt and medieval Europe built great pyramids and cathedrals out of stone. The approach in China, as Leys points out, is for builders to yield to the onrush of time by using eminently perishable, and indeed fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood with paneling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture has built-in obsolescence, demanding frequent renewal. “Eternity should not inhabit the building,” Leys writes. “It should inhabit the builder.” Rather than using the strongest materials, Chinese builders have embraced transience to ensure the eternity of spiritual designs.

The shining exemplar of this idea is found not in China but at the Ise Grand Shrine (or Ise Jingu) in Japan. Ise Jingu is the holiest shrine in Japan’s Shinto faith. Since it was first erected in 690 AD, craftspeople have completely rebuilt its sacred temples—made of wood and hay—every twenty years. In 2033, the temple will be rebuilt for its sixty-third reconsecration. Ise Jingu’s halls are made of Japanese cypress timbers that support a raised floor and are covered by a thatched roof of dried silvergrass. These structures use techniques from the seventh century: no nails, only dowels and wood joints. Though wood joinery is a complex craft, the rest of the construction is simple.

Why does this ritual persist? In part, it has to do with the Shinto faith in spiritual renewal. And it is also because these shrines are built in the style of rice warehouses, dedicated as they are to the god of agriculture, which rot every few decades. It is also about the preservation of craft knowledge. Twenty years is the length of a generation, and the caretakers of the Ise Jingu have attempted to ensure that knowledge about how to rebuild this shrine can be passed on to descendants. Junko Edahiro, an environmental writer who witnessed the sixty-second rebuilding, heard an elderly fellow say to younger folks, “I will leave these duties to you next time.”

Edahiro wrote a piece entitled “Rebuilding Every 20 Years Renders Sanctuaries Eternal.” Shrine staff make plans measured in centuries: They have a two-hundred-year road map to plant enough cypress trees to make the nearby shrine forest self-sufficient, rather than having to ship timber in from other parts of Japan. Their planning and the ritual make me wonder how much process knowledge the West has given up. When a fire broke out on the roof of Notre Dame de Paris in 2019, it revealed how little knowledge about cathedral construction is left in the world. I would bet that Ise Jingu, built out of wood, will endure longer than the great pyramids and cathedrals made of stone.

Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice. That is closer to the approach used in China and Japan.

If Japanese craftspeople have put in this much work to retain knowledge of a seventh-century temple, how are we supposed to maintain the vast technological civilization we’ve built? This wooden structure is so much simpler than a modern auto plant, to say nothing of a semiconductor fab. Can we moderns preserve manufacturing knowledge without enacting the rituals of craftspeople?

The answer, perhaps, is that we can’t. It’s not just Boeing and Intel that have lost their way. In the time it took to do one rebuild of the Ise Jingu, the US government forgot something only as important as nuclear weapon material. The National Nuclear Security Administration found that it could no longer produce “Fogbank,” a classified material used to detonate the bomb, because it hadn’t kept good records of the production process and everyone who knew how to produce it had retired. The NNSA then spent $69 million to relearn how to produce this material.

It’s rare for blueprints to encode enough information to be technologically valuable. Imagine if we were able to send the most detailed instructions for building any modern technology back to the past. The lead chariot engineer of a Roman caesar would get nowhere with the most detailed manual and finely drawn blueprints on how to produce a Model T. Nor would many of us in the present be able to do much if we got our hands on the instructions for producing an Intel processor or ASML lithography machine. I am not proud to have struggled with putting together a footrest from IKEA.

Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s. There, someone might work at an iPhone plant one year, for a rival phone maker the next, and then start a drone company. If an engineer in Shenzhen has an idea for a new product, it’s easy to tap into an eager network of investors. Shenzhen is a community of engineering practice where factory owners, skilled engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers mix with the world’s most experienced workforce at producing high-end electronics.

Silicon Valley used to be like this too, but now it lacks a critical link in the chain—the manufacturing workforce. The value of these communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology.

The American imagination has been too focused on the creation of tooling and blueprints. Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel, said it best in 2010: that the United States needs to focus less on “the mythical moment of creation” and more on the “scaling up” of products. Grove saw Silicon Valley transition from doing both invention and production to specializing only in the former. And he understood quite well that technology ecosystems would rust if the research and development no longer had a learning loop from the production process.

The United States does want to re-create Shenzhen’s success. But it has had, at best, a surface-level understanding of its success. Silvia Lindtner, a professor at the University of Michigan and my wife, has spent more than a decade studying Shenzhen’s technology ecosystems. In 2015, the Austrian government asked her how to create a Shenzhen in the Alps; in 2016, the White House invited her to present on how the United States might learn from the success of Shenzhen. She has felt, as I do, that these agencies misunderstood the point of Shenzhen. They were still more interested in individual inventors rather than understanding it as a community of engineering practice. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.

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Viewing technology as people also helps us understand why economic relations between the United States and China have broken down. Through the 1990s and especially after 2001 (when China acceded to the World Trade Organization), American companies were busy moving manufacturing work to China. Apple’s collaboration in Shenzhen helped transform the city into the world’s most innovative hub for electronics production. But this win for Apple’s shareholders has been a loss for American power.

US manufacturing employment peaked in 1980 at nineteen million workers. In 2000, it still had seventeen million. Then it collapsed over the next decade, in part due to China, in part due to technology changes, and especially after the global financial crisis, when the workforce fell to just eleven million in 2010. In 2025, the United States has around thirteen million manufacturing workers.

At times, American elites have been strangely good humored about the departure of manufacturing jobs. In 1993, the chief economic adviser to George H. W. Bush, Michael Boskin, quipped, “Computer chips, potato chips, what’s the difference?” It became part of the elite consensus that the United States could lose manufacturing. This consensus portrayed union bosses, as well as the handful of heterodox economists, as sentimentalists for resisting offshoring. Neither the Clinton nor George W. Bush administration restrained American firms from moving manufacturing operations to China. Now, it’s more obvious that the departure of manufacturing has created economic and political ruination for the United States. We are still only beginning to understand how much it set the country back technologically.

Many of the United States’ most storied companies have been ailing. Detroit’s automakers, having limped along for decades, are now stumbling through the transition to electric vehicles. US Steel, General Electric, and IBM are shadows of their past selves. Intel, mired in cycles of blown product timelines and layoffs, went from a semiconductor trailblazer to a clear laggard behind Taiwan’s TSMC. After two of Boeing’s 737 MAX jets crashed in 2017, the company promised strenuous efforts to guarantee the safety of its aircraft. Then a door blew off midair in 2024. Boeing, like Intel, is constantly delaying the launch of long-planned products.

Even the military-industrial complex looks challenged. The United States spends nearly $1 trillion a year on defense, about as much as the next ten countries combined. The return on this investment is not clear. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine blew through several years’ worth of American munitions stockpiles in a matter of months, and American factories have struggled to scale up production. Fighter jets have faced enormous delays and cost overruns. The US Navy has reported that every single class of its ships and submarines is one to three years behind schedule.

American manufacturers aren’t all languishing. Tesla is America’s great hope in automaking. There remain many leaders across semiconductor production equipment makers, medical devices, and agricultural equipment. The great success of the US manufacturing sector over the past several years was the production of mRNA vaccines, which have saved lives around the world. But the triumphs in medicine and pharmaceuticals were not matched by the broader set of American manufacturers, who failed to produce basics like masks and cotton swabs.

The US manufacturing base has, with some exceptions, rusted from top to bottom. Why have so many manufacturers crumbled? Partly, I think, we can examine the culture of financial investors. Wall Street has been far keener to invest in capital-light businesses: digital platforms like social media and search engines or chip companies that focus on design rather than cumbersome fabrication facilities. If it weren’t for Tesla (which makes many of its cars in Shanghai), the United States would be even further behind China in electric vehicles. And Tesla’s survival was a close-run thing. In 2018, Elon Musk said that Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy as it tried to ramp up the production of the ultimately successful Model 3. It was a time he called “excruciating.” In retrospect, it is an indictment of the American financial system that fundraising for a manufacturing leader had to be this difficult. Financialization also intersects with corporate consolidation. One prominent line of argument regarding General Electric was that the company was taken over by finance. That applies in greater force against Boeing. Once run by engineers obsessed with safety and quality, its leadership shifted to executives more focused on delivering shareholder value than good planes.

Mostly, though, I think the problem lies with American policymakers and executives who fail to grasp the importance of process knowledge.

American manufacturers spent the better part of three decades unwinding its stock of process knowledge when it opened so many factories in China. Every US factory closure represents a likely permanent loss of production skill and knowledge. Line workers, machinists, and product designers are thrown out of work; then their suppliers and technical advisers struggle as well. Entire American communities of engineering practice have dissolved, leaving behind a region known as the Rust Belt. Some mayors and governors tried to stem this receding tide. But they were continuously scorned by economists and executives, who sought low-wage production in the name of globalization. Still today, many American economists doubt there is anything special about manufacturing and put their faith in the inevitable march to a service economy.

Low-wage ecosystems like Shenzhen became a giant magnet for US process knowledge. Beijing made a deliberate decision not to be like Japan, which kept its market limited to American companies; rather, China mostly welcomed foreign manufacturers to train its workers. It is some sign of China’s economic openness that so much of its exports are driven by Apple and Tesla, while Japanese exports have been driven almost entirely by its own companies. After it built up a critical mass of process knowledge, however, Shenzhen became as much an innovator of new electronics as an implementer of American ideas.

It’s not clear to me that it was part of Beijing’s grand strategy to rely on American companies to become a manufacturing leader. But in some cases, the state understood that’s what they were doing. Beijing did something unprecedented for Tesla in 2018: It allowed the company to fully own its plant in Shanghai. Previously, any automaker that wanted to produce in China had to partner with a domestic company. So Japanese, German, and American companies dutifully partnered with state-owned enterprises in order to access the enormous market. The state had hoped that these domestic companies would learn from the likes of Toyota and Mercedes-Benz and match their quality. In reality, Chinese automakers were sluggish from their research dependence on their foreign friends.

Tesla’s presence jolted China’s electric vehicle market. China’s business community began using the term “catfishing” for what Tesla was doing in China. The idea was that introducing a powerful new creature into the domestic environment would make Chinese firms swim faster. That’s exactly what they did to raise their game. When Tesla vehicles started rolling out of the Shanghai Gigafactory in 2019, BYD saw its sales decline by 11 percent, while profits fell by 42 percent. But Tesla would eventually do the whole market a favor. As in the United States, the company’s audacious branding stimulated consumers to think of electric vehicles as more than high-powered golf carts. And Tesla made investments in China’s tooling ecosystem that other automakers exploited to produce better cars. BYD benefited as well, reporting record profits in 2023 and becoming the world’s largest electric vehicle maker. And even the Communist Party’s main newspaper praised how Tesla produced the “catfish effect” for Chinese firms.

As Grace Wang, founder of Shenzhen-based Luxshare (one of Apple’s new contract manufacturers), poetically expressed, “Flying with phoenixes will nurture outstanding birds.” It is another lesson that capitalist Shenzhen has taught the Communist Party: Market competition tends to lower prices and raise quality.

Apple and Tesla have made a huge effort to train its Chinese workers to manufacture their products—and earned fabulous sums of money by doing so. These stories are replicated in varying degrees across China’s other communities of engineering practice, production hubs for shoes and garments in the eastern city of Wenzhou, medical equipment in Wuxi and Suzhou, and, most wonderfully of all, guitars in the mountains of Guizhou’s Zheng’an County. Overall, China’s manufacturing workforce employs more than a hundred million people, around eight times that of the United States. That is a big stock of people who are fueling the creation of new process knowledge.

A focus on manufacturing gives China another advantage in technological competition with the United States. It can simply wait for American scientists to do the fundamental research before Chinese companies take over the production. That is, in essence, what happened with the solar industry. Bell Labs invented the first solar cell, and German companies produced solar production equipment. Beijing’s designation of solar as a “strategic emerging industry” invited Chinese companies to rush into this industry. Chinese companies bought German equipment and competed fiercely to make the most efficient solar cells. By the mid-2010s, Chinese companies figured out how to make all the German tools, as well as the entirety of the solar value chain. The plunge in solar power costs over the last decade has been driven less by breakthroughs in science—which is the United States’ strong suit—than by efficient production, which is China’s strength. The beneficiaries are not only the climate but also China’s national power.

Science matters of course. China remains weak in chips and aviation in part because these are much more scientifically complex industries than solar. Not every technology improves through iterative adjustments to manufacturing processes, but a great deal can follow its logic. When lots of companies are doing similar things, in a brutally competitive environment where profit margins are small, they establish communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen. These factories will never be as glamorous as the desirable branding represented by Apple or Tesla. Every day, millions of workers go to factories to build up technological process knowledge. That is the basis of China’s tech power.

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China has become a tech superpower by exalting process knowledge and the communities of engineering practice that keep it alive. Holding on to process knowledge helps us resist bad ideas about China's rise. The Communist Party would love to claim that China’s technology sector developed the way it has through wise planning from Beijing. And the American government also overstates the importance of the Chinese government through its accusations of cheating (including with unfair subsidies) or stealing (especially through cybertheft).

The results of the Chinese government’s unceasing interventions in the economy are at best ambiguous. Economic studies have shown that the recipients of Chinese subsidies have, on average, lower productivity growth. Xi’s aggressive promotion of industry has triggered trade wars with not just the United States but also many developing countries as well. China’s tech successes are no convincing demonstration that a wise state can plan the future. When the state shoves its weight around—forcing foreign companies to hand over technology, showering a favored sector with subsidies, injuring a firm while elevating another—it is often far from being helpful. The forced technology transfer agreements meant to prop up China’s state-owned automakers instead robbed their need to invest in their own innovative capacities. China’s automotive successes come from companies like privately owned BYD, which had no foreign partners, after the entrance of wholly owned Tesla forced the company to raise its game.

American administrations have complained about a host of China’s trade practices: forced technology transfers; currency manipulation that keeps exports cheap; subsidies and generous credit terms for local firms, sometimes funding their expansion overseas; and, worst of all, unauthorized cyber intrusions, or the state-directed hacking to steal US trade secrets. Overall, they create an environment for foreign businesses that is often unfair and sometimes baffling.

In response, the first Trump administration launched its trade war. But it didn’t just levy tariffs on Chinese goods. It expanded and deployed novel technology controls meant to cripple Chinese firms. While I was covering the impacts of Trump’s tech war from Beijing, I remember often waking up to wonder which Chinese company he might be tweeting about. China’s tech leaders found themselves designated to sanctions lists maintained by obscure US government agencies that few US officials had even heard of. Once they’re on a list, which blocks American funding or technologies, it’s hard to get off.

I thought that the US government was right to push back against China’s mercantilist trade practices. But I also thought that it was doing so in mostly ineffective ways under Trump’s chaotic direction. In particular, I was skeptical of the security-based view of the Trump administration (as well as the successive Biden administration): that the United States still controls a lot of technological chokepoints, if only the government weren’t asleep at the wheel while China stole its way to primacy; and that if the US government stepped hard on export controls, it would be able to recover technology primacy from a country that cannot match American ingenuity.

The Trump administration certainly throttled Chinese companies. But it did so by making American companies (especially those selling semiconductors) unreliable vendors. Previously, Chinese companies bought the best components on the market, which were often American, because they wanted to sell a globally competitive smartphone or drone. When they couldn’t buy American, it lit a fire under Chinese companies to try domestic vendors that they would never have previously given the time of day.

When I worked in Silicon Valley, people liked to say that knowledge travels at the speed of beer. Engineers like to talk to each other to solve technical problems, which is how knowledge diffuses. They are poached by rival firms or sometimes rival countries. Over the longer run, it’s difficult for countries to monopolize their dominance over any technology. If such a thing were possible, then the United States would still be behind the United Kingdom or Germany, which were much greater scientific innovators.

The US government has indulged a preening self-regard concerning how much technological power its country still wields. American companies have spent two decades building communities of engineering practice in China, made up of people who roll up their sleeves to figure out how to overcome their daily bottlenecks. It wasn’t going to be easy to stop their progress; if anything, American policies risked accelerating it. So far, Chinese companies have managed to innovate around most technological restraints; rather than face precipitous collapse, as US policymakers predicted, some have even managed to keep growing at a healthy clip.

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Foreign companies seeded the initial growth of zones like Shenzhen two decades ago. Now, the relationship between the United States and China has soured. Does that mean that communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen will wither? Yes, but not for a long while.

The process of extricating manufacturing production from China will be prolonged and halting. International companies continue to tell me that they are still reluctant to completely pull up their roots from what remains an extraordinary production hub and a very big market. Apple is making immense efforts to cultivate production sites in Vietnam and India. But it is going to be gradual, since the infrastructure and labor in these countries will take a while to catch up. According to Apple’s most recent supplier report (released in 2023), 156 of its top 200 suppliers have manufacturing sites in China. Seventy-two of them are in Shenzhen’s province of Guangdong, which is as many as there are in the United States, Vietnam, and India combined.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping is insistent about holding on to manufacturing. China’s Communist Party might be the most technology-obsessed institution in the world. The engineering state is intent on achieving tech primacy before multinationals pull away.

On a 2023 inspection tour through Jiangsu province (like Guangdong, a manufacturing powerhouse), Xi said, “The real economy is the foundation of a country’s economy, the fundamental source of wealth creation, and an important pillar of national strength.” It is the basis, he continued, of “human production, life, and development.” He has repeatedly said that China needs to prioritize the real economy, which means the world of manufactured products, rather than the virtual or financial economy, sometimes referred to in state media as the “fictitious” economy. State-affiliated researchers commonly denounce financialization with the hollowing out of manufacturing in the same breath.

Xi isn’t just ambitious about manufacturing. A better word to describe his views might be “completionist.” Andrew Batson, research director at Gavekal Dragonomics, came upon a 2024 boast from the minister of industry and information technology that China has a “comprehensive” industrial chain, since it produces something in each of the 419 industrial product categories maintained by the United Nations to classify industrial production. It’s a very Chinese sort of boast.

Batson has furthermore detected a shift in Xi’s rhetoric on manufacturing. Previous Chinese leaders have talked about the importance of upgrading industry, which sometimes means limiting investment into labor-intensive or highly polluting sectors that China no longer needs. Xi has declared that China targets completionism, which means that not even “low-end industries” should move out of China. Rather than follow economic logic, in which production gravitates toward countries with lower labor costs—which the United States and other high-income countries have more or less accepted—Xi does not want industry to keep shifting around.

So the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan released in 2021 demands that the manufacturing share of the economy stay constant. Manufacturing already accounts for 28 percent of China’s GDP, which is much higher than Germany’s 21 percent and Japan’s 20 percent, to say nothing of deindustrialized economies like the United States and the United Kingdom (both around 10 percent). Xi has repeatedly stated that he’s not interested in abandoning manufacturing for services. In authoritative speeches, Xi cited “certain Western countries” that forsook the real economy for the fictitious economy. No points for guessing which Western countries these might be. And Xi has declared that “the real economy is the basis of everything . . . so we must never deindustrialize.”

That is what the engineering state is about. It likes to build not just public works but also manufacturing capacity. The engineering state resists economists as easily as lawyers. Economists may cite David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage as a reason to permit production to move away. The engineering state declines, aghast at losing manufacturing because it’s somehow cooler to be in services.

So far, China hasn’t felt the economic pressure to abandon low-end manufacturing (clothing, footwear, and so on), in part because there are still a lot of poor Chinese provinces like Guizhou that have cheap labor. That trend might not hold given escalating tariffs. But if Xi is successful, it means that other developing countries (in Asia, Africa, and around the world) will be unable to climb the industrial ladder that China reigns over. Developed countries have reason to be alarmed as well. Since China is so large, it has the financial firepower to target any industry it wants for technological leadership. Small countries have had to pick their battles, as Denmark did in the wind industry and South Korea did with memory chips.

China wants to have it all.

China’s political leadership has long cherished its hatred of Western domination and nurtured its fantasy that the country could have succeeded if only it had science, technology, and industrial production. Every Chinese leader since the Qing emperors who lost the Opium Wars has felt aggrieved about falling behind in technology. Maintaining an industrial base is the best guarantee that China won’t lose again. This thread runs through China’s modern leaders, from Nationalist Sun Yat-sen, his protégé Chiang Kai-shek, and then the Communist rulers too. Deng Xiaoping launched his great project to unshackle China from socialism by appealing to the Four Modernizations: agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology. In recent years, Xi Jinping has issued increasingly urgent calls to make China advanced and self-sufficient in technology, though often in bland mouthfuls like the “innovation-driven development strategy” or the Marx-inspired “new productive forces.”

An obsession with technology has spawned what is perhaps the most interesting online movement in China. In the heavily censored realm of the Chinese internet, where no group is allowed to be very organized, one set of intellectuals has made themselves heard. They are loosely affiliated writers who refer to themselves as the Industrial Party. Their views are simple to summarize: that nation-states ruthlessly compete with each other; that science and technology are the decisive forces in this Darwinian competition; and that therefore the state must be organized around the pursuit of science and technology. They patriotically view the Communist Party as the world’s most capable political organization for this pursuit.

I’ve spent months reading some of the foundational texts around the Industrial Party. A few of these works have English translations, but most are left untouched, with much of the writing consisting of screeds on online bulletins. They tend to carry a combative tone that scorns liberals, advocates of democracy in China, and, sometimes, leftists who yearn for Mao. They set themselves against those guilty of romanticism, which they label as the Sentimental Party.

The stalwarts of the Industrial Party have diverse backgrounds. The eldest member, Wang Xiaodong, introduced the party name in an online essay in 2011. Wang had trained as an economist and found his calling as a fierce nationalist: Since the 1990s, he has written scathing books calling for China not to slavishly follow Western (and mostly American) values, culminating in a bestseller, China Is Unhappy, which issued a blunt call to take a more confrontational approach with the American-led order.

Zhong Qing trained as an electrical engineer in Japan and developed his views by establishing an early presence on China’s online bulletin boards. His 2005 book Wash Dishes or Study? called for full technocratic control over the economy in order to pursue science and technology. That meant forgoing low-end manufacturing to pursue a crash program building fighter jets and semiconductors. The most active contributor to the Industrial Party ideas over the past few years is a pseudonymous writer named Shenzhen Ningnanshan, who describes himself as a middle-class person based in Shenzhen, who might be working with a state-affiliated think tank. Shenzhen Ningnanshan’s articles are fully in line with the Chinese state’s orthodoxy, advocating for a gradualist approach to science and technology investment, with a focus on semiconductors in order to break the US stranglehold on this technology. That makes him more of a political moderate in the Industrial Party.

Perhaps the most interesting way that the Industrial Party’s ideas have been propagated is through an online novel, The Morning Star of Lingao, which has been serialized by a group of authors since 2009. It is an alternate-history project that imagines that five hundred people from contemporary China traveled back in time to Lingao County in Hainan (the tropical island that is China’s southernmost province) in the year 1628. Their goal? To trigger an industrial revolution in the Ming dynasty. Ma Qianzu is a writer involved in the early creation of this series and is one of the more interesting personalities on the Chinese internet. Ma propelled the Industrial Party toward a breakout moment in 2011: After China’s deadliest train collision, he forcefully advocated that the state should press forward with its development of the high-speed rail program (which it did). Ma is also a thinker with an independent streak. In recent years, he has exposed wasteful government spending and has been critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These unusual positions have sometimes landed him in the censors’ crosshairs.

None of these writers would proclaim himself a card-carrying member of the Industrial Party. They are loosely connected bloggers only sometimes in conversation with each other. Ma Qianzu has rejected the label of Industrial Party, and Wang Xiaodong has renounced some of his earlier nationalism. In recent years, he has said that China is not yet ready to sever ties with the West. A few of these writers work in academia and think tanks, which suggests direct ties to the policymakers; some of their views are reprinted in China’s state media. A few, interestingly, have studied in Japan, calling for China to imitate its wartime tormentor. Many are military nerds, who know by heart the specs of different leading fighter jets. For them, there is no problem heavy industry cannot solve.

I wonder, when I read these works, whether the Industrial Party is a modern name for an old idea. These writers have a futurist bent, they denounce liberal niceties, and they demand total mobilization of the economy to pursue science and technology.

Are they simply reinventing fascism? The Industrial Party wants to depoliticize society to enable rule by technocrats, who would wield the propaganda organs to motivate people to pursue science and manufacturing. They are a heavily male group that mocks pluralism. They are not advocating conquest, but they do pine for a future in which China is stronger than any other nation. The Industrial Party tends not to cite a broad range of thinkers, only forceful leaders like Mao or Stalin who repelled invaders and established an industrial base. It is a worship of strength through technology.

The one work that much of the Industrial Party has rallied around is the science fiction trilogy by Liu Cixin. The Three-Body Problem is one of China’s most successful cultural exports in the past decades, earning praise from American readers as well as a big-budget Netflix adaptation. I have been deeply drawn in by the trilogy myself. Its premise is that a victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution grew so disgusted with humanity that she invited extraterrestrials to conquer human civilization; when her action is discovered, governments have a few decades to prepare for the invasion.

Liu’s story spans not only galaxies but also eighteen million years. He created startling images: a silver probe resembling the shape of a water droplet that destroys most of Earth’s spacefleet; a particle the size of a proton that contains a whole world; a starry sky that flickers for a single observer. Major characters struggle with strategic questions involving deduction and deception, and a wrong move could be fatal not to the individual but to humanity at large.

The morality of the Three-Body trilogy is, meanwhile, animated by the bleakest of worldviews. On one level, the trilogy is a celebration of humanity’s ingenuity in an existential struggle. To defeat the alien threat, Liu depicts humanity’s total subordination to technocratic authorities. Scientists and engineers are the ultimate decisionmakers, leaving no room for humanists, the faint of heart, or sentimentalists. Governments are made to submit to the will of select geniuses who do not hesitate to sacrifice millions. The prevailing idea in Liu’s trilogy is that the only hard truth is survival, where opposing civilizations resemble “blood-drenched pyramids lit by insidious fires seen through dark forests.” Again and again, Liu resolves the plot in favor of the party that is willing to be the most brutal in its will to survive.

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It’s easy to see why Industrial Party enthusiasts have elevated Liu’s work to the top of its canon. It may as well be, in addition, a guide to the ideology of the engineering state.

China took up a lot of the dirty industries that the United States was happy to get rid of. In some cases, literally: Rare earth metals are not really rare. Processing them, however, demands enormous amounts of energy and water while spewing carcinogens into the atmosphere. Few parts of the Western world have the stomach for processing rare earth metals, which is why China controls this supply chain.

Most forms of low-end manufacturing aren’t as bad as that, but the United States was just as willing to let them go, with little understanding of how much it would hurt the country. It’s hard, I admit, to draw a straight line between the loss of, for example, television manufacturing in the United States through the 1980s to the stumbles by Boeing and Intel over the past decade. But if we think about technology ecosystems as communities of engineering practice, it makes sense that factory closures accelerated as process knowledge dissolved, prompting production problems and more job losses. And it also makes sense that Chinese workers went from merely assembling iPhones to producing some of their most valuable components as well. As one country lost its process knowledge, the other gained whole industries.

The United States has changed its mind on policy: It wants manufacturing jobs back. But how to achieve that is terribly unclear. Tariffs under Trump and subsidies under Biden haven’t decisively moved the needle. Indeed, China’s goods exports to the United States hit a near record in 2022, the same level as in 2018, when the Trump administration initiated tariffs on China.

How can the United States do better? As a starting point, it could develop a better understanding of how China has grown into a technology superpower. If members of Congress continue to resort to the laziest explanations (“they’re just stealing all our IP”), then the United States will never grasp the importance of building up process knowledge. And it will fail to gain urgency to fix its technological deficiencies.

At the same time, Americans should develop a bit more humility about their own technological capabilities. The sooner that the United States treats China as a peer worth studying, the sooner it can develop a new playbook for success. Chinese companies are currently beating the rest of the world in the production of electric vehicle batteries. So why not allow a few of them to build factories, as they are trying to do, in states like Michigan, and force them to give up their technology? The US government could force Chinese battery makers to transfer intellectual property in exchange for accessing the giant US market for cars.

And which types of technologies the United States should pursue is also worth meditating on. Should it really go all in on artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and other things that the Communist Party mocks as the fictitious economy? Or should it pursue the sorts of heavy industry that have long fallen out of fashion among American elites and out of favor among American investors?

The reality is that the United States will never again be a bigger manufacturer than China. Its much smaller population, the higher wage and standard-of-living expectations, and the dollar’s status as a global reserve currency make that harder. On a practical level, it is difficult to imagine that Americans can tolerate the work habits of people in Shenzhen or Henan: working on assembly lines for eight hours a day, eating at cafeterias at designated times, crammed six to a dorm room at night. Manufacturing workers in the Midwest like to drive their pickup trucks home.

Everything starts from the recognition that something has gone quite wrong in US technology. Too many people have argued away the strategic importance of manufacturing. And the solution has to involve reconstituting its communities of engineering practice that prioritize process knowledge. It means attempting to build up every segment of manufacturing: training workers and creating incentives for manufacturers in order to relearn mass production.

This scenario sounds a bit fantastic, but if the iPhone were built in the United States rather than Shenzhen, then an American city—say, Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh—might be hailed as the hardware capital of the world. The follow-on innovations in consumer drones, hoverboards, electric vehicle batteries, and virtual reality headsets could have sprung from American firms. Engineers wouldn’t have to fly from Cupertino across the Pacific to reach their giant factories. They could iterate on product improvements closer to home, labeling their newest products “Designed in California, Assembled in Pennsylvania.”

The United States must regain, at a minimum, the manufacturing capacity to scale up production that emerges from its own industrial labs. If it does not, continuing to value scientific breakthroughs rather than mass manufacturing, then it might lose whole industries once more—as it did by inventing the solar photovoltaic panel but relying on China to produce them. The United States likes to celebrate the light-bulb moment of genius innovators. But there is, I submit, more glory in having big firms making a product rather than a science lab claiming its invention. Otherwise, US scientists would once again build a ladder toward technological leadership only to have Chinese firms climb it.

Shenzhen, one day, will lose its gleam. Perhaps that process has already started. On my last visit there in 2021, I passed by the Huaqiangbei electronics market, where vendors were selling more cosmetics than cables and capacitors. Hardware has become too commoditized a business, forcing the entrepreneurial folks at Huaqiangbei to turn their attention to China’s growing demand for skin-care products. It’s hard to imagine eye creams are in line with Xi’s goal to resist deindustrialization. And yet, there it is, in a trend that a state media headline captured as “Huaqiangbei Trades Computer Chips for Lipsticks.”

Was it an indication that not even the engineering state can resist consumer demands, yielding to the onrush of time? The moment was a brief one. Huaqiangbei returned once more to selling mostly electronics, as the tidal wave of Chinese industrial products is now washing up against the rest of the world. Overinvestment and an insistence against deindustrialization has protected China, for now, from suffering the unhappy fate of the American Rust Belt.

China would be better off if engineers confined themselves to building in the physical world. But they have been more ambitious than that. Beijing is made up, unfortunately and fundamentally, of social engineers. One of the major threats to China’s tech power—and its global position more broadly—is the result of a disastrous decision undertaken decades ago to engage in population engineering.