For decades, the 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: within a few years, China has become one leading superpower in innovation and today it 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 history of the price to pay 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 Nineteenth century and first Twentieth centurywhen 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 takes place within this context, the Nanjing massacre of 1937 during the Japanese invasion: in a few weeks they were consumed systematic violence against civilians and prisoners, with estimates between 200 thousand and 300 thousand victims.
China which for centuries, since it was founded in 221 BC., was seen as the leading civilization he found himself in Asia poor, colonized and humiliated. From that trauma the obsession with “national rebirth” was born, 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 it is the State to drive the market. It is a “coordinated machine”: government, universities and businesses they act like a single organismdriven 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 learningwhich allowed them to acquire know-how expendable for your industrial system.
This “coordinated machine” then has invested very, very much 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: theirs political culture. The. has been in power since 1949 Chinese Communist Partywhich not only survived the fall of other communist systems, but emerged strengthened from it. Its resilience lies in having fused political ideology with the millenary culture local, building stability on four pillars:
- There traditional culture: Confucian values, hierarchy, harmony, respect, have been integrated into their political system;
- The political control: a strong central power;
- The 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”;
- There 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 returnnot a simple ascent. 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
Everything is fine economic miracle has a cost and the first, in this case, is pollution. Between the 1980s and early 2000s China has burned coal without brakesbuilt factories without filters, discharged into aquifers, without environmental protections mandatory in Europe for decades.
According to the World Health Organization, air pollution causes more than that every year one million premature deaths and Beijing in 2013 recorded PM2.5 concentrations up to 40 times higher than the limit considered safe by the WHO. The professor Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago 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 the Work. The growth was fueled by hundreds of millions migrant workersi mingongin conditions Often very hard: 12-14 hour shiftsovercrowded dormitories, starvation wagesno 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 energetic paradox: it is the country that emits the most CO₂ in the worldbut that’s also what invests more 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: the freedom. They are in China blocked social media such as YouTube, Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, but also international publications such as 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 Zhanindependent journalist, in February 2020 she moved to Wuhan, in the midst of the COVID-19 emergency to document live what she found, from overcrowded hospitals to the official data that didn’t add up. In May she disappeared, stopped by the police; in December it was condemned four years on charges of “seeking fights and causing trouble”, a vague formula 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 condemned again at four years old, after a closed-door trial. AND it is not an isolated case: Jimmy Laifounder of Apple Daily in Hong Kong, has been in isolation since 2020, and Ilham Tohtia Uighur economist who promoted dialogue between Uighurs and Han Chinese, was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 for “separatism.”
Then there is the issue of preventive surveillance: it is estimated there are over 500 million cameras and the system begins to recognize not only faces but also gait. Then there is the system social creditto 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. Go below a certain threshold means Not be able to buy tickets airplanes or high-speed trains.
It’s a heavy reality: in the West we have many things to improve, but we can criticize the government without being arrested, manifestGoogle anything, use a VPN legally. In China you can’t 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’s a paradox: the modernization and the wealth Not they brought more freedombut more arrests and longer sentences.
The concept of face and truth
Finally, there is a cultural aspect that explains certain dynamics even more: the mianziwhich translates to “face” or “reputation“. Lu Xunone of the greatest Chinese writers of the twentieth century, a figure comparable to what Leopardi is for us, defined him as “guiding principle of the Chinese mindThe expression describes the status and the a person’s reputation in the eyes of others and protecting one’s image and social harmony often prevails over revealing unpleasant facts. Better a harmonious half-truth than a whole and uncomfortable truth.
And for them it is not hypocrisy: it is a system of values different from ours, in which the truth is not the supreme value, but it is harmony. 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 the Chinese foreign propagandaaccording to which the Communist Party wants China to acquire a respectable reputation internationally.
