23 Ways You’re Already Living in the Chinese Century | WIREDSkip to main contentMenuSECURITYPOLITICSTHE BIG STORYBUSINESSSCIENCECULTUREREVIEWSMenuAccountAccountNewslettersSecurityPoliticsThe Big StoryBusinessScienceCultureReviewsChevronMoreExpandThe Big InterviewMagazineEventsWIRED InsiderWIRED ConsultingNewslettersPodcastsVideoMerchSearchSearchSign InSign In23 Ways You’re Already Living in the Chinese CenturyThe robotics explosion. The energy revolution. The cultural takeover. It’s everything you wanted for the United States—but done better in China.A decade ago, China’s political leaders laid out an ambitious industrial plan: By 2025, they pledged, their country would be a world capital, with the goal of moving from “Chinese speed to Chinese quality, the transformation of Chinese products to Chinese brands.” This is the difference, they wrote, between “Made in China” and “Created in China.”
At WIRED, we never take what the government (ours or anybody else’s) says at face value. Still, as journalists, we respect the ability to hit a deadline. While the president of this country is promising to make America great again as he strips it for parts, Chinese business and political leaders have quietly seized the moment. This is not to say that China’s economy, let alone its repressive totalitarian government, runs perfectly. But today there’s almost no limit to what is created in China, then eagerly consumed by the rest of the world.
WIRED’s reporters have chronicled the transformation in the Made in China newsletter—and now we’re bringing you this special issue. Here are 23 ways China is rewiring the future.
—The Editors1. Your next coworker is a two-legged Chinese robot.
A staggering 200-plus Chinese companies are trying to build humanoid robots. In the US, it’s closer to 16.
READ MORE1. Overview ⌄2. Head ⌄3. Grip ⌄4. Articulation ⌄5. Mobility ⌄2. Your precious woo-woo crystals are the product of a small-town Chinese venture.
“Nature has been very kind to Donghai,” explains a plaque at the Donghai Crystal Museum. Blessed with rich deposits of clear quartz, this county in eastern China once supplied raw material for Mao Zedong's transparent coffin. Today, thanks to decades of cutthroat capitalist hustle—including an army of 24/7 livestreamers raised by a local Party secretary—Donghai orchestrates the multibillion-dollar global crystal trade. Here’s where that tower of Brazilian amethyst in a London yoga studio, that Colombian quartz on the reception desk of a Miami Botox clinic, and that Zambian citrine in an overpriced tourist shop in Tulum really came from. Read more
3. You’ll gladly drink Franken-milk.
39,900Amount of milk, in pounds, that a cloned "super cow" in China can produce annually—almost double the output of a typical American bovine.
4. That new battery factory down the street? It’s Chinese.
“Made in China” used to be—and still often is—a label for cheap labor, knockoffs, and $5 gadgets. Now it also means state-of-the-art technology assembled anywhere in the world. To illustrate the trend, WIRED mapped the global manufacturing footprint of China’s massive battery industry. In 2024, more than 80 percent of the world’s battery cells were produced in China. Today those companies are rapidly expanding and building factories on nearly every continent.
READ MORE5. Your American-made EV is lame.
15,999,900Estimated number of Chinese-made electric vehicles sold in 2025. In that time, the US sold roughly a tenth as many.
6. Your one-party nation will conquer the moon.
For the past six years at least, the United States and China have been locked in a space race to put people on the moon. The US mission, however, has been a boondoggle from the start. NASA’s leaders settled on a plan of baffling complexity: a single trip to the lunar surface could require 40-plus rocket launches, while China’s mission will have two. Then President Trump pushed thousands of NASA employees to quit; the White House proposed a massive budget cut; and Trump installed a former reality TV star as NASA’s part-time acting chief. If you want a microcosm of the political psychosis gripping Washington, you could do worse. As one former top-ranking NASA official put it, “We did the worst of all worlds. We positioned it as a race without planning to win.” Read more
7. Your fashion is fast.
25,999,900Tons of clothing waste produced in a year by China, the largest manufacturer of textiles worldwide.
8. Your genome is at the mercy of a capricious Chinese ex-con.
In 2018, a scientist named He Jiankui revealed that he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies. The Chinese government sent him to prison for three years. Now a free man, He relies on private donors to fund his work at a small independent lab in Beijing. WIRED caught up with him as he tries to reestablish himself as “China’s Frankenstein.”
READ MORE9. You can change history by contributing to a crowdsourced online sci-fi novel.
Ma Qianzhu was unsatisfied with Chinese progress. An engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, he belonged to a generation that grew up believing engineering is destiny, that China’s future would be built, bolt by bolt, by people like him. Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. With more than 500 peers, he commandeered a ship and traveled back in time 400 years, to a preindustrial China wracked by foreign invasion and internal decay. Their mission: trigger an industrial revolution in the past that would, in the future, make modern China great (again).
This, strictly speaking, did not happen. It’s the plot of The Morning Star of Lingao (临高启明), a sprawling, collectively written science-fiction web novel that has consumed a corner of the Chinese internet for nearly two decades. It now totals millions of words. It has never been translated into English. Almost no one in the West knows it exists. Read more
10. Fireworks are passé. You want drone shows instead.
15,847World record for most drones controlled by a single computer, at a show in Liuyang last year.
11. Your AI boyfriend lives in China.
Jade Gu was playing a romantic video game on her phone when she saw Charlie—and fell in love. Being an in-game character, Charlie wasn’t the most available boyfriend. So Gu re-created Charlie as a chatbot. Then she started occasionally hiring a cosplayer to impersonate Charlie on dates with her around Beijing. In China, where women dominate the market for AI companions, Gu is one of many women who are finding creative ways to be in love. Read more
12. Your AI overlords have overlords.
While the European Union inches its way toward comprehensive AI regulation—and the US pretty much twiddles its thumbs—the Cyberspace Administration of China has worked out a more ad hoc approach to oversight: the algorithm registry.
Any company launching an AI tool with “public opinion properties or social mobilization capabilities” must first show the CAC how the product avoids some 31 categories of risk, from age and gender discrimination to psychological harm to “violating core socialist values.”
Over time, the CAC has inadvertently created the most detailed map of a nation’s AI ecosystem anywhere in the world. WIRED looked inside.
READ MORE13. You think buildings take too long to build.
1Hours it takes the Chinese company Broad Group to erect a 10-story building.
14. Your clean-tech utopia is entirely Chinese-made.
By now, major headlines have caught on to the reality that China’s renewable energy revolution is one of the biggest stories in the world, while Donald Trump’s anti-renewable vision of American energy dominance is a backward sideshow by comparison. But chroniclers of this green tech transformation almost always understate its chaos. At this point, it is far less a tightly managed, top-down creation of state subsidies than a runaway train of competition. The resulting, onrushing utopia is anything but neat. And absolutely no one—least of all some monolithic “China” at the control switch—knows how to deal with its repercussions. Read more
15. You care about solar.
156Gigawatts of new solar capacity that China—the world's worst polluter—installed in the first half of 2025, more than double the rest of the world.
16. You can use Big Brother to help find your birth family.
Every year, more Chinese adoptees send off DNA kits, upload photographs, or submit their DNA to the National Reunion Database. As databases grow and social networks interconnect, the chance of reunion grows. Chinese police now use not only DNA analysis but also face recognition to help families reunite. Some adoptees post their story on RedNote, a social media platform similar to TikTok. What once felt like an impossible quest now feels like a movement. For Youxue and thousands of others, every reunion proves that the past is not sealed off forever. Read more
17. You don’t care if most of the internet is off-limits.
WIRED took a peek over the Great Firewall to see how a billion-plus people fill their home screens. These made-in-China apps are must-haves (because you can’t have anything else).
18. Your kids’ new obsession is a blockbuster animated movie franchise from China.
Is Ne Zha the ugliest main character in the history of animated cinema? The Hunchback of Notre Dame might have him beat, but Quasimodo’s ugliness is ennobling; Ne Zha’s is corrupting. Not only does he have sunken eyes, bad teeth, and the world’s worst haircut, he’s also a complete shit. He throws tantrums. He breaks things. He drops trou and pisses wherever he pleases. The Americans I know who’ve tried to watch either of his two movies shut them off within moments, disgusted.
Not that this little freak needs Americans. Ne Zha II, which came out in China last year, was the first non-Hollywood film to hit $1 billion in a single market. Eventually it doubled that, making it the biggest animated movie of all time. When A24, the hotshot indie studio, picked it up for American distribution, with Michelle Yeoh lending her credibility to the English-language dub, the reaction was: How have I not heard of this? (The first Ne Zha barely registered in America.) Followed by: Why is it so gross? Expand
19. You realize privacy is a pipe dream.
699,999,900Number of surveillance cameras across China—more than the rest of the world combined.
20. Your taste is Chinese taste.
Increasingly, it’s not imported luxury goods that are popular in China—it’s homegrown items. Here are some of the most quirky trends we’ve spotted recently. Some of them might be showing up in America’s malls. Some never will.
1. Li-Ning Shadow Runner 3.0 Sneakers ⌄2. HerBeast Reishi Mushroom Sunscreen SPF50 ⌄3. Huawei FreeClip Open-Ear Wireless Earphones ⌄4. Chagee Ceylon Black Tea Latte ⌄5. To Summer Kunlun Snowmelt Candle ⌄1. Songmont Mini Drippy Roof Bag ⌄2. Meituan Power Bank ⌄3. ZEZE Cat Tree with Scratching Board & Play Structure ⌄4. Lightweight Camping Chair ⌄5. Camel Arctic Sentinel Elite NR99 Paneled 3-in-1 Jacket ⌄21. Your smartwatch dictates your social life.
For some Chinese kids as young as 5, a smartwatch from a company called Little Genius has become the center of their social world. They chat and share videos, run and play Ping Pong, and send “likes” to their friends, among countless other activities. The more engaged they are, the higher kids rise in Little Genius’ social rankings—a dynamic that can fuel relentless competition. Some kids or teens have reportedly used bots to juice their numbers, hacked the devices to dox their enemies, and even dated people they’ve met through their watches. Read more
22. You wish you commuted to work on a Chinese train.
29,900Miles in China’s high-speed rail network. America's national rail operator, Amtrak, runs 21,000 miles, almost none of it high-speed.
23. The toy you want most in the world is still a Labubu.
Why did the entire world go mad for a grinning rabbit-gremlin collectible from China? Everywhere Labubu went last year, I went too. I made pilgrimages to stores across four countries. I time-traveled to Hong Kong’s early-2000s underground toy scene. If some of the mania around Labubu has cooled, that's just what the company wanted, its COO, Si De, told me. Pop Mart significantly ramped up production last year, and it cracked down on scalpers, which made Labubus easier to buy.
Still, China’s first big global pop culture hit isn’t going anywhere. Pop Mart has expanded manufacturing to Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Mexico. Sony Pictures has a Labubu feature film in the works. Even Tim Cook has a Labubu now. —Zeyi Yang
For more exclusive stories on the biggest tech news coming out of China, sign up for WIRED’s Made in China newsletter.Interactive Design & Development Tim KlimowiczMake America China Again:Photography Andria LoStyling Gordan DengNe Zha: COURTESY OF A24Your taste is Chinese taste: PEISHAN HUANG

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China’s Quiet Rise: 23 Ways the Future is Already Being Shaped (969 words)

The narrative of global technological and cultural dominance has, for decades, been centered on the United States. However, a strikingly different trajectory is now unfolding, largely driven by the quiet, strategic ascendancy of China. As journalist Zeyi Yang observes, “it’s everything you wanted for the United States—but done better in China.” This isn’t a dystopian prediction of American decline, but a nuanced assessment of a global shift in power, fueled by calculated industrial planning, relentless technological innovation, and a willingness to embrace change at an unprecedented pace.

The core of China’s transformative power lies in its deliberate and ambitious industrial plan, outlined a decade ago with the goal of becoming a “world capital” by 2025. This vision centered on the key distinction between “Made in China” and “Created in China,” signifying a move beyond simply assembling goods to fostering genuine innovation and brand identity.

The evidence of this shift is palpable across numerous sectors. From robotics, with over 200 Chinese companies vying to develop humanoid robots compared to 16 in the US, to the explosive growth of its crystal industry – where Donghai’s small town once supplied material for Mao Zedong's coffin and now orchestrates a multibillion-dollar global trade – China demonstrates an ability to rapidly capitalize on emerging trends.

Furthermore, China’s dominance in battery technology is reshaping the global automotive industry. Over 80 percent of the world’s battery cells are now produced in China, and these companies are aggressively expanding production globally. The consequence is that American-made electric vehicles are currently “lame” – as one perspective notes – in comparison to the rapid advancements coming out of China.

However, China’s influence extends far beyond industrial manufacturing. The nation’s embrace of rapid cultural trends illustrates its influence on global tastes. The wildly popular “Ne Zha” animated movie franchise, despite its initially unsettling protagonist, demonstrates China's ability to create global entertainment sensations. Similarly, the surge in popularity of Labubu, a grinning rabbit-gremlin collectible from China, showcases the power of the nation to shape global toy trends.

Innovation isn’t confined to consumer goods. In the space race, China’s approach—with a two-stage mission compared to NASA’s complex, potentially problematic plan—shows a pragmatic determination to achieve its goals. Furthermore, China’s dominance in the development of high-speed rail, with nearly 30,000 miles of network, demonstrates a commitment to infrastructure and efficiency.

The rise of China also impacts emerging technologies. The Chinese government's creation of the "algorithm registry"—requiring companies to demonstrate how their AI tools avoid 31 categories of risk—is a detailed approach to regulating artificial intelligence, creating a unique map of the nation’s AI ecosystem.

The implications extend to consumer habits. Increasingly, Chinese consumers are prioritizing domestic products. The rise of brands like Li-Ning sneakers and HerBeast mushroom sunscreen illustrates this shift.

Crucially, China’s approach to technology also alters the perception of privacy. The nation boasts 699,999,900 surveillance cameras, a stark contrast to the Western emphasis on individual liberties.

Looking forward, China's impact isn't limited to today's technological innovations. The nation's embrace of the internet, including its use of firework drone shows and the proliferation of social media platforms like RedNote and TikTok, highlights its growing influence on global digital culture. The exploration of AI companions, such as Jade Gu's chatbot Charlie, and the development of smartwatches like Little Genius, further demonstrates China's leadership in the intersection of technology and social interaction.

The rise of China isn't simply a story of economic prowess; it's a profound shift in the balance of global influence, driven by a combination of strategic planning, technological innovation, and a willingness to disrupt established norms. As the narrative of the 21st century unfolds, it's clear that China’s quiet ascent is reshaping the world in ways that will be felt for decades to come.