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David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker
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In recent years, Evan Osnos has trained his reportorial eye on Washington, but when he first began writing for the magazine, in 2008, it was as our correspondent in Beijing, where he remained until 2013. The author of “Age of Ambition,” a remarkable book on the ascendancy of China, Evan recently returned to Beijing to get a sense of how the central economic and strategic drama of the twenty-first century, the rivalry between the U.S. and China, has evolved. His new piece, “The Future, Made in China,” is as unsettling as it is astonishing.
Illustration by Cleon Peterson
At the Hyperfactory, a sprawling auto plant in Beijing that’s become a popular destination for foreign investors and tech tourists, at least seven hundred robots work in coördination to build new cars, the parts for which are delivered by more than a hundred autonomous carts. According to the facility’s operator, a company called Xiaomi, a new car rolls off the line every seventy-six seconds.
Some of this, of course, is ripe for propaganda. But, in many ways, China really is speeding ahead toward a new technological future. Jim Farley, the C.E.O. of Ford, recently called the country’s automotive progress “the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen.” China operates more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and, in 2024, it rolled out nine such new robots for every one in America. It already produces the majority of the world’s drones, lithium batteries, and solar panels, and its ship-building capacity is around two hundred times that of the U.S.
China, Osnos reports, “is eager to restore its historical eminence, after two hundred years of what the Party sees as anomalous poverty.” And, in the Trump Presidency, it may have found an opening. Two decades’ worth of Chinese investments in research and foreign policy are coming into bloom, Osnos writes, at the same moment that America is faltering on the world stage. Trump has launched new military interventions, withdrawn from international institutions, and alienated allies, all while sowing chaos domestically. America’s international approval ranking is tanking, and, in some polls, China’s has now surpassed that of the U.S. A recent paper produced by a think tank in Beijing was titled “Thank Trump,” and praised the American President for accelerating the “twilight of an empire.”
And yet ambition and speed alone can’t propel China to global dominance. The country is recovering from a collapse in the housing market in 2021. And the Party still needs to convince its own populace of the state’s vision. As Osnos points out, the success of the engineering state “carries you only so far if people are so alienated that they decline to bring children into the future being built for them.”
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