For decades, China has been perceived in the Western imagination as the “copy factory”: the expression Made in China it was synonymous with poor originality and quality. But that era is over: in just a few years, China has become a leading superpower in innovation and today represents one of the global technological vanguards.
The Chinese national rebirth, which in just 30 years has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and transformed the Dragon from a “factory of the world” to a global colossus, is part of its history, not just recent ones.
But how was it possible? To really answer there is one thing to keep in mind from the beginning: this is the story of two sides of the same coin. On the one hand there is the success story; on the other there is the story of the price to be paid to achieve that success. Today’s China cannot be understood without keeping both of these elements in mind. Let’s start from the beginning.
The Century of Humiliation and the success machine
To understand China today we need to take a step back, to the so-called “Century of Humiliation”, between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the country was progressively weakened, attacked and subsequently divided among foreign powers (such as Great Britain, France, Russia and Japan), losing control, sovereignty and international prestige. One of the most dramatic episodes fits into this context, the Nanjing massacre of 1937 during the Japanese invasion: in a few weeks systematic violence took place against civilians and prisoners, with estimates of between 200 thousand and 300 thousand victims.
China, which for centuries, since it was founded in 221 BC, was seen as the leading civilization in Asia, found itself poor, colonized and humiliated. From that trauma was born the obsession with “national rebirth”, and it is the starting point for understanding China today. For Beijing, progress is an act of historical justice.
The relationship between state and market in China
Unlike Western countries, where the market drives innovation, in China the state drives the market. It is a “coordinated machine”: government, universities and businesses act as a single body, guided by long-term national objectives. They have channeled enormous public resources into research and development and supported strategic companies (such as Huawei and DJI) with easy credit and domestic market protection.
This is the key to understanding why China “copied”: it was a form of industrial learning, which allowed them to acquire know-how expendable for your industrial system.
This “coordinated machine” then invested a lot in education: in the 1980s only 2% of the population had a university education, today over 50% of young graduates enter university, with widespread participation in STEM faculties. This industrial system is so integrated that it manages to cover the entire production chain, from design to the distribution of materials. In fact, China today is one of the few countries in the world to have such an integrated production chain.
All this, however, was possible thanks to a fundamental core: their political culture. The Chinese Communist Party has been in power since 1949 and has not only survived the fall of other communist systems, but has emerged strengthened. Its resilience lies in having fused political ideology with the local millenary culture, building stability on four pillars:
- Traditional culture: Confucian values, hierarchy, harmony, respect, have been integrated into its political system;
- Political control: a strong central power;
- Tactical nationalism: the wound of the Century of Humiliation has been transformed into an identity glue, according to which “the survival of the Party is the survival of China”;
- Economic performance: from Deng Xiaoping onwards, growth and well-being have become the new legitimacy of the regime.
Today’s China must be framed according to the concept of a return, not a simple rise. It’s the first side of the coin: now let’s turn it over to see the second side.
The price we don’t see: pollution and 14-hour work shifts
Every economic miracle has a cost and the first, in this case, is pollution. Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, China burned coal without brakes, built factories without filters, discharged it into aquifers, without the environmental protections that have been mandatory in Europe for decades.
According to the World Health Organization, air pollution causes over a million premature deaths every year and Beijing in 2013 recorded PM2.5 concentrations up to 40 times higher than the limit considered safe by the WHO. Professor Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago has calculated that pollution in the northern provinces reduces average life expectancy by more than three years (in some areas up to 5 years less).
The second price concerns work. The growth was fueled by hundreds of millions of migrant workers, i mingongin often very harsh conditions: 12-14 hour shifts, overcrowded dormitories, starvation wages, no real union protection, because independent unions do not exist in China. In 2010, at Foxconn (where iPhones are assembled) there were 14 employee suicides in just a few months, a number that forced even Apple to ask questions publicly.
China is today an energy paradox: it is the country that emits the most CO₂ in the world, but it is also the one that invests the most in renewable energy. It is simultaneously the problem and part of the solution.
Freedom Is the Greatest Cost: What the Great Firewall is
But the deeper cost is another: freedom. In China, social media such as YouTube, Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook are blocked, as are international newspapers such as the New York Times and Wikipedia. The system is called Great Firewalla digital filter that isolates citizens from the global internet. VPNs are used to get around it, but since 2017 even unauthorized ones are illegal.
Then there are the people. Zhang Zhan, an independent journalist, moved to Wuhan in February 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 emergency, to document live what she found, from overcrowded hospitals to official data that didn’t add up. In May she disappeared, stopped by the police; in December she was sentenced to four years on charges of “seeking fights and causing trouble”, a vague term applicable to anyone who disturbs the Communist Party.
Released in May 2024 after a hunger strike and various hospitalizations, a few months later she was again in detention, on the same charge: on 19 September 2025 she was sentenced again to four years, after a closed-door trial. And it is not an isolated case: Jimmy Lai, founder of Apple Daily in Hong Kong, has been in solitary confinement since 2020, and Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist who promoted dialogue between Uighurs and Han Chinese, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 for “separatism”.
Then there is the issue of preventive surveillance: it is estimated there are over 500 million cameras and the system is starting to recognize not only faces but also gait. Then there is the social credit system, which needs to be described precisely: there is no single national score, but the system is fragmented and varies from city to city. In the city of Rongcheng each person starts at 1,000 points: arguing with neighbors costs 5, not picking up the dog’s waste costs 10, donating blood earns you money. Going below a certain threshold means not being able to buy plane or high-speed train tickets.
It’s a heavy reality: in the West we have many things to improve, but we can criticize the government without being arrested, demonstrate, Google anything, use a VPN legally. In China you cannot look up the story of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, nor criticize Xi Jinping online, nor do journalism in “sensitive” areas without risking prison. And it is a paradox: modernization and wealth have not brought more freedom, but more arrests and longer sentences.
The concept of face and truth
Finally, there is a cultural aspect that explains certain dynamics even more: mianzi, which translates as “face” or “reputation“. Lu
And for them it is not hypocrisy: it is a system of values different from ours, in which truth is not the supreme value, but harmony is. This logic, rooted in Confucianism, merged with the authoritarian structure of the Party. And it’s not a personal interpretation: the Wilson Centerone of America’s leading research institutes, explicitly uses the term mianzi to describe Chinese foreign propaganda, according to which the Communist Party wants China to acquire a respectable reputation internationally.
