In the decade that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideology took control in India, things did not stand still elsewhere. In 2015, China’s Prime Minister Li Keqiang announced a 10-year initiative to reduce China’s reliance on foreign technology and to move China from being a low-cost manufacturer to a direct competitor to the most advanced economies: Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and the United States. This plan was named Made in China 2025. It identified sectors like semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robotics, commercial aircraft, drones, high-speed rail, electric vehicles and batteries, advanced ships and solar panels
. The sectors were classified into those where in China’s assessment it was ‘behind’, where it was ‘competitive’ and where it was a ‘global leader’. In 2015, the Chinese were, according to Bloomberg, behind in most sectors, competitive in a couple (high-speed rail, batteries) and leaders in solar panels. The ambition was to ensure that China was competitive or leading in all of these industries.
Also Read
After the plan was announced, it seriously offended America and its allies. America, in particular, is not used to another nation being a ‘global leader’ in anything, because it alone has the god-given right to dominate the world.
America’s president also felt threatened by the rise of China, which today has an economy of about 2/3rds the size of the US and will likely equal it in the next couple of decades.
This dislike of China’s ambitions was so deep that China soon stopped speaking about ‘Made in China 2025’. After Donald Trump first took office in 2017, the US slapped tariffs against China. The following year, China’s Huawei came under sanctions and restrictions. Then under President Biden, the US banned the sale of high-end computer chips to China. All of these actions were to harm China’s further rise and an economic partnership that had benefited both nations began to rupture. Today Trump is willing to penalise Americans by risking inflation through his tariffs, so long as they will slow China’s growth.
Now, while China did not advertise the name ‘Make in China 2025’ the plan continued to be implemented. In 2025, it has become competitive in all of the sectors and is the global leader in half of them. China today produces and flies commercial aircraft of the type only Boeing and Airbus make. The Chinese-made Comac planes are already being used by airlines.
Last month, Deep Seek revealed to the world what Chinese capabilities are in artificial intelligence. This came as a shock to America for two reasons. The first was that the Chinese did this without having access to the most advanced chips from Nvidia and likely without as much access to capital as the California firms have. The second reason was that Silicon Valley never imagined that it would be equalled by a company from across the Pacific. There are only two serious contenders in the race to develop artificial general intelligence and it is the US and China, not Europe and not any other country.
Despite facing export controls, Huawei now makes chips that are only a little behind the most advanced being made by Taiwan. They are not at the cutting edge, but they are homemade and Chinese talent can make do with fewer resources as Deep Seek shows. China makes its own aircraft carriers — the largest was deployed in 2022 — and LNG carriers. It debuted some of the most advanced military aircraft in the world in January. Of course, in electric cars, high speed rail, solar panels, batteries and drones, China has no rival. It is the world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of electric cars. It makes 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels, 75 per cent of the world’s lithium ion batteries (one Chinese company, CATL, alone controls a third of the global market) and 75 per cent of the world’s drones (again, one company, DJI, controls a significant chunk of the global market). China has 2/3rds of the world’s high-speed rail network, about 40,000 km (the Ahmedabad-Mumbai distance is 500 km) and China’s network is still growing.
Many in the West and especially in America have been sceptical of China’s continued growth and believe that it will soon falter. However, this view has been present for at least 20 years but China has not obliged them. Consider that India and China were even in 1990, on the cusp of our economic reforms, but today China’s economy is six times the size of India’s.
The rupture between India and China after 2020, the tariffs from the United States and a reluctance to grant access to advanced Chinese goods from India have meant Indians are only vaguely aware of the progress our neighbour has made. In many ways China is inward-looking and the absence of a popular English media there has not made it easy for us to appreciate their progress. Our media’s ignorance or lack of interest in China’s progress has compounded the problem.
But the world recognises that China has become an advanced economy, through a plan conceived and implemented over just one decade. Li Keqiang died in 2023, but he went with likely a sense of satisfaction about what had been delivered by China under its 10-year plan. This was the same decade, to remind readers once again, in which the BJP and our Prime Minister held thrall over India with their ideology.
