23 Ways You're Already Living in the Chinese Century
The 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 Editors
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.
20,000
Amount 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.
5.
Your American-made EV is lame.
Estimated 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
