A 2012 story in the New York Times reported that Apple needed to hire nearly nine thousand industrial engineers in the earlier days of iPhone production. The company’s analysts expected recruitment to last nine months to hire that many engineers in the United States. In China, they were able to do it in two weeks. A large pool of good labour increases the speed of design and production cycles. As Tim Cook once said, “In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.

The magic of Shenzhen is the combination of the world’s most creative hardware engineers sitting in a sea of components that improve every year amid a labour force of millions who know how to put together electronics. The buzzing ecosystem has produced many other products that follow in Apple’s wake, like hoverboards, electric scooters, virtual reality headsets, and who knows what’s next?

In 2007, Apple imported nearly all of the high-valued components— display screen glass from the United States, camera modules from Japan, memory chips from South Korea, sensors from Germany— to Shenzhen. China’s contribution consisted mostly of the labour involved in assembling foreign products, which was around 4 percent of the phone’s final value. One former Apple executive told me that the iPhone supply chain grew more “red” over the next decade as it incorporated domestically produced components— meaning that it incorporated more Chinese components.

By the mid-2010s, Chinese companies figured out how to make all the German tools, as well as the entirety of the solar value chain. The plunge on solar power costs over the last decade has been driven less by breakthroughs in science— which is the United State’s strong suit— than by efficient production, which is China’s strength. The beneficiaries are not only the climate but also China’s national power.

Science matters of course. China remains weak in chips and aviation in part because these are much more scientifically complex industries than solar. Not every technology improves through iterative adjustments to manufacturing processes, but a great deal can follow its logic. When lots of companies are doing similar things, in a brutally competitive environment where profit margins are small, they establish communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen. These factories will never be as glamorous as the desirable branding represented by Apple or Tesla. Every day, millions of workers go to factories to build up technological process knowledge.

Xi isn’t just ambitious about manufacturing. A better word to describe his views might be “completionist.” Andrew Batson, research director at Gavekal Dragonomics, came upon a 2024 boast from the minister of industry and information technology that China has a “comprehensive” industrial chain, since it produces something in each of the 419 industrial product categories maintained by the United Nations to classify industrial production. It’s a very Chinese sort of boast.