Made in China 2025

Based on Wikipedia: Made in China 2025

In 2024, something remarkable happened. Despite six years of American tariffs, export controls, and financial sanctions designed to stop it, China quietly achieved most of what it set out to do a decade earlier. The country now leads the world in electric vehicles, solar panels, high-speed rail, drones, and advanced battery technology. It happened faster than almost anyone predicted.

This is the story of Made in China 2025—a government plan so ambitious it alarmed Washington, Brussels, and Tokyo, and so successful that Chinese officials stopped talking about it publicly even as they kept pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into making it real.

The Problem China Was Trying to Solve

For decades, China was the world's factory. That phrase sounds impressive, but it actually describes a kind of trap.

Here's how the trap works. Countries like China with lower wages attract foreign companies looking to manufacture products cheaply. Those companies bring their designs, their technology, and their expertise. Chinese workers assemble iPhones, stitch Nike shoes, and weld car parts. But the really valuable work—the engineering, the innovation, the intellectual property—happens somewhere else. The profits flow back to California or Munich or Tokyo.

This model created hundreds of millions of jobs and lifted enormous numbers of people out of poverty. But it has a ceiling. As Chinese workers became more educated and wages rose, the country started losing manufacturing jobs to Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other nations where labor remained cheaper. Meanwhile, China still wasn't designing the advanced products that command the highest prices and profit margins.

Stuck in the middle. That's where China found itself by the early 2010s—too expensive to compete with poorer countries on cheap goods, but not yet capable of competing with Germany, Japan, and the United States on sophisticated technology.

The Plan Takes Shape

In 2013, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology gathered a group of scholars and technical experts with a single question: How could China become a manufacturing superpower?

Their answer emerged two years later as Made in China 2025, signed by Premier Li Keqiang in May 2015. The name itself was a statement of intent—this wasn't a vague aspiration but a deadline.

The plan identified ten industries where China would aim to become a global leader:

• Information technology and telecommunications
• Robotics and automated machine tools
• Aerospace and aviation equipment
• Maritime engineering and high-tech shipping
• Advanced rail transportation
• Electric vehicles and new energy vehicles
• Power equipment and smart grid technology
• Agricultural machinery
• New materials including advanced composites
• Biopharma and medical devices

These weren't random choices. Each industry represented a sector where foreign companies dominated, where profit margins were high, and where future growth seemed assured. If you controlled these industries, you controlled the commanding heights of the twenty-first century economy.

What Made This Different

Industrial policy—government efforts to shape which industries grow and which decline—isn't new. Japan famously used it in the 1960s and 1970s. South Korea built Samsung and Hyundai with extensive state support. The United States, despite its free-market rhetoric, has always subsidized defense contractors and research universities.

But Made in China 2025 was industrial policy on a scale the world had never seen.

Consider the numbers. The Chinese government committed roughly $300 billion to the program in 2018. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and China responded by pouring at least another $1.4 trillion into the same initiatives. To put that in perspective, the entire gross domestic product of the Netherlands is about $1 trillion.

The program attacked from multiple angles simultaneously. Companies in targeted sectors received lower tax rates. The government funded research and development directly. It created national laboratories and offered grants to encourage private research. It built forty new research and development centers across the country. It set specific numerical targets for everything from R&D spending as a share of revenue to environmental protection standards.

Perhaps most controversially, the plan explicitly encouraged Chinese companies to acquire foreign technology firms—buying the expertise they couldn't yet develop at home.

The Semiconductor Obsession

No technology mattered more to Made in China 2025 than semiconductors—the tiny chips that power everything from smartphones to missiles.

Why semiconductors? Because advances in chip technology cascade into advantages everywhere else. Faster chips mean better artificial intelligence. Better AI means smarter factories, more capable weapons, more competitive products. Whoever has the best chips gains leverage across the entire technology landscape.

And in 2015, China didn't make good chips. Not even close.

The most advanced semiconductors are manufactured using photolithography machines—devices that use light to etch impossibly small circuits onto silicon wafers. A single cutting-edge machine from ASML, the Dutch company that dominates this market, costs over $150 million and requires multiple jumbo jets to transport. The precision involved is staggering; we're talking about features measured in nanometers, where a nanometer is to a meter what a marble is to the Earth.

China set out to build its own semiconductor industry from the ground up. It created a National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund with over $20 billion in initial capital. It recruited aggressively from Taiwan's world-leading chip industry, luring away more than 3,000 engineers with lucrative offers. Among them was Charles Kau, sometimes called Taiwan's "Godfather of DRAM," who spent five years working for a Chinese company.

This is where the plan ran into its limits. Despite all the money and effort, China still cannot manufacture the most advanced chips. The specialized equipment and know-how remain concentrated in Taiwan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States. When Bloomberg analyzed Made in China 2025 in late 2024, semiconductors was one of the sectors where significant foreign dependency remained.

The Backlash Begins

For the first few years, Made in China 2025 attracted relatively little attention in the West. That changed dramatically in 2018.

The Trump administration declared that China's government-backed industrial policy posed a "threat to U.S. technological leadership." On June 15, 2018, the United States imposed tariffs specifically targeting the industries identified in Made in China 2025—information technology, robotics, and the rest.

This was the opening shot in what would become a sprawling technology war.

The American response went far beyond tariffs. The U.S. barred certain Chinese companies from participating in infrastructure projects. It scrutinized Chinese involvement in university research. It restricted the transfer of aerospace technology. Congress passed legislation strengthening export controls and foreign investment screening. Individual Chinese companies like Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit faced investigations over technology theft.

In 2022, President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, committing $52 billion to rebuild American semiconductor manufacturing—essentially, America's answer to Made in China 2025.

Europe responded too. The European Commission published reports calling for the European Union to increase its industrial and research performance. The EU Chamber of Commerce in China warned that the initiative would increase Chinese protectionism, distort markets, and favor domestic companies over foreign ones.

Even countries that benefited in the short term grew nervous. Japanese companies initially saw Made in China 2025 as a business opportunity—after all, Chinese factories needed Japanese semiconductor equipment and robotics. But Japanese commentators worried that China might become a formidable competitor once it no longer needed those imports.

The Disappearing Slogan

Something curious happened in 2018. Just as American tariffs began to bite, the phrase "Made in China 2025" started vanishing from official Chinese communications.

Government websites scrubbed references to the plan. Officials stopped mentioning it in speeches. The once-prominent slogan became almost taboo.

But the program itself? It continued unchanged. The money kept flowing. The targets remained in place. Research centers kept opening. Chinese companies kept receiving subsidies and tax breaks.

This was a strategic choice. By removing the provocative branding, China hoped to reduce the plan's visibility as a target for foreign criticism while continuing to pursue the same objectives. It worked, to some extent—the intense American focus on "Made in China 2025" as a threat began to fade even as the underlying policies accelerated.

The Scorecard

How do you evaluate a plan this ambitious? The most comprehensive analysis came in late 2024, when multiple organizations attempted to tally the results.

The South China Morning Post examined over 260 specific goals from the original plan. Their finding: 86 percent had been achieved.

Bloomberg Economics tracked thirteen critical technologies. They concluded that China had achieved global leadership in five: high-speed rail, graphene, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), solar panels, and electric vehicles combined with lithium batteries. In seven other areas, China was rapidly closing the gap with world leaders.

Some sectors exceeded expectations wildly. The plan set a target of producing 3 million electric vehicles per year by 2025. China hit that number in 2023—two years early. The company BYD has become the world's largest electric vehicle manufacturer, producing cars that compete with and often beat German and Japanese rivals on both price and quality.

Renewable energy tells a similar story. Chinese companies now dominate global solar panel production so completely that attempting to build a solar industry anywhere else means competing against Chinese state-subsidized giants. Chinese wind turbines spin on every continent.

The failures were concentrated in the most technologically demanding areas. Advanced photolithography for cutting-edge chips remains out of reach. China still cannot build intercontinental passenger aircraft to compete with Boeing and Airbus. Satellite internet networks lag behind SpaceX's Starlink. The new materials sector, encompassing exotic composites and specialty chemicals, had the lowest completion rate at 75 percent.

What It Means

In February 2025, a U.S. congressional hearing convened to assess where things stood. Experts warned that the United States risked "losing the next industrial revolution."

That language might sound alarmist, but consider what has changed. In 2015, Chinese technology was largely derivative—copied or purchased from elsewhere. A decade later, Chinese companies lead in industries that will define the coming decades: clean energy, electric transportation, advanced batteries, drones.

The geopolitical implications are profound. When you buy a solar panel, there's a good chance it's Chinese. When you charge an electric vehicle, the battery probably contains Chinese components. When you fly a consumer drone, it's almost certainly made by DJI, a Chinese company. This represents leverage—economic, strategic, and political.

At the same time, Made in China 2025's limits reveal something important. The most sophisticated technologies—the ones that require decades of accumulated expertise, the ones where tacit knowledge matters as much as blueprints—resist even the most determined industrial policy. You can throw hundreds of billions at semiconductor manufacturing, but you still need the Dutch photolithography machines. You can recruit thousands of Taiwanese engineers, but institutional knowledge doesn't transfer so easily.

The Deeper Question

Barry Naughton, a China expert at the University of California, San Diego, raised an uncomfortable question in 2021. Is it sensible, he asked, for a country that is still middle-income—where hundreds of millions of people remain far poorer than Americans or Europeans—to take "such a disproportionate part of the risky expenditure involved in pioneering new technologies"?

From a purely economic perspective, the answer might be no. The money spent on cutting-edge research could have gone to schools, hospitals, or poverty alleviation. The returns on high-tech investments are uncertain and often take decades to materialize.

But Naughton acknowledged that Chinese policymakers have "other considerations." They see the world in terms of great power competition. They remember the century of humiliation, when technologically superior Western powers and Japan carved up China. They believe that technological leadership and national security are inseparable.

Made in China 2025 was never just an economic program. It was a bid for a different kind of future—one where China stands at the technological frontier rather than in its shadow.

Whether that future benefits the Chinese people, or the world, remains to be seen. What's no longer in doubt is that the bid itself has largely succeeded.