People visit the exhibition area of Digital Technology during the Fourth China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE) in Beijing, capital of China, June 23, 2026. [Photo/Xinhua]
Throughout June, I traveled from Beijing to Urumqi in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region to cover major trade events, including the fourth China International Supply Chain Expo and the ninth China-Eurasia Expo. I found myself asking executives from multinational companies the same question: Has anything fundamentally changed about investing in China?
Their answers were rarely identical, but they almost always pointed in the same direction.
The more executives I interviewed, the more I noticed an interesting pattern. Tariffs were mentioned. Geopolitics came up. Supply-chain diversification was part of almost every conversation. Yet none of those topics became the center of the discussion. What they wanted to talk about instead was China's manufacturing ecosystem — and why it remains remarkably difficult to replicate.
That contrast made me rethink a common assumption. China's competitive advantage today is no longer defined primarily by low-cost manufacturing. It increasingly lies in something much harder to replicate: system-level certainty — the ability to innovate, manufacture and deliver efficiently within an integrated industrial ecosystem.
