Technological innovation in China: a journey that changes the way you see things

From "Made in China" to global benchmark: the paradigm has changed

Let me start from the conclusion, because it is the lens through which I reread every stop. For twenty years the West described China as the world's factory: low-cost products, modest quality, more copying than inventing. Today that story is simply false. In high-tech sectors China is no longer catching up: it sets the standard.

The numbers leave no room for interpretation. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2025 China produced roughly three quarters of all the electric cars on the planet and became the world's leading car exporter, with electric vehicle exports doubling to a record of more than 2.5 million units. Over 80% of the world's battery cells are made in China. And while in 2020 electric cars were just over 6% of the Chinese market, today they account for more than half of all new car sales.

The same story plays out in robotics. The International Federation of Robotics confirms that in a decade China went from about one fifth to more than half of the world's industrial robot installations, with an operating fleet of over two million units — the largest in the world. And for the first time, Chinese manufacturers are outselling foreign suppliers at home.

That is the context. Now let me take you inside the companies, because that is where statistics become flesh, steel and silicon.

Beijing: where AI policy meets the tech giants

Our first visit, right after landing in Beijing, was to the Xiaomi EV Factory. For us Europeans, Xiaomi is still "the smartphone company". In China it is a company that entered the premium car market in just a few years: in the showroom, an SU7 electric sedan rotates suspended in mid-air, like a manifesto. To build it, Xiaomi created a smart factory — in practice an almost fully automated "dark factory" — where huge sections of the car body are die-cast in a single motion, with a level of automation that redefines what "cycle time" means. It is tangible proof of one idea: in China, the distance between consumer electronics and automotive has shrunk to the point of disappearing.

The next day we entered the Zhongguancun Embodied Intelligence Innovation Industrial Park, in the Haidian district: Beijing's main hub for humanoid robotics and "embodied intelligence", the AI that learns to move and act in the physical world. We got there thanks to Lorenzo Gonzo — former science attaché at the Italian Consulate in Chongqing, today Head Advisor for International Cooperation at ITTN, the international technology transfer network. There I got close to a still "open" humanoid, cables and motors in plain sight, built by Boundless Power: a startup founded in March 2025 that, by April 2026, had already raised more than 100 million dollars.

In the same park I shook hands with the founder of Rossum Robotics, a startup whose surgical robot has already performed more than 800 complex orthopedic operations. Because a journey like this is not just about looking: it is about coming home with real contacts.

In the afternoon, a VIP tour of JD.com showed us its logistics machine: warehouses where orders are sorted by automated systems and where delivery by drones and robots is everyday operations, not an experiment. In the evening, at the Italian Cultural Institute, we met the Italian Ambassador Massimo Ambrosetti: a conversation that gave the mission the institutional framing it deserves.

The next day, standing before the Forbidden City and on the Great Wall at Mutianyu, I felt the meaning of our work with full force. A country that preserves millennia of history and, a few dozen kilometers away, builds the robots of 2030. Past and future do not exclude each other: they talk to each other. This is exactly the bridge our Foundation wants to represent.

Shanghai, Cixi and Hangzhou: finance, mobility and robots

From Beijing to Shanghai we traveled on the high-speed train: more than 1,300 kilometers in just over five hours, on an infrastructure that by itself tells the story of a systemic choice.

In Shanghai we brought together academia, Italian excellence and institutions. At Tongji University we were welcomed by the Dean of the College of Innovation and Design, Xin Xiangyang, together with Prof. Avril Accolla: a meeting that did not stop at words. It produced a collaboration between Tongji and the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio — Erasmus student exchanges and visiting professors — starting in September 2026. For a foundation that sets out from Italy, watching one of our universities seal an academic bridge with one of Shanghai's best universities is the thesis of this journey made concrete.

At the Brembo Inspiration Lab Asia – Bilab I had the honor of speaking on behalf of the Foundation alongside Brembo: an Italian standard-bearer that in China does not follow — it leads. At the Consulate General of Italy, with Consul Tiziana D'Angelo, the "Sistema Italia" meeting — with ICE (the Italian Trade Agency) and the Italian Chamber of Commerce in China — reminded us that when our country plays as a team, it has everything it takes to stay in this game.

In the Hangzhou area we visited the Geely Group's smart factory — the flagship plant of the Zeekr brand — where about 820 robots support a capacity of more than 300,000 cars a year: over 800 vehicles a day. During the visit they told us about their "dark factory" in Cixi, an almost fully automated plant that runs with no operators on the line — a production model that hints at where Chinese manufacturing is heading.

At Alibaba we understood that the company is not "the e-commerce site": it is cloud, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure for entire continents.

But it was Unitree Robotics that left us speechless. Watching the Go2 quadruped robots move with almost animal agility, and a humanoid grab and sort objects on a conveyor belt right in front of us, was one of those moments when you feel the future has stopped being a promise. It is no coincidence that Chinese companies like Unitree now account for the vast majority of the world's humanoid robot installations.

Closing the chapter: the headquarters of Meituan, the super-app that manages the daily life of more than seven hundred million people, and the Shanghai Data Exchange, the world's first exchange for trading data as digital assets. Every stop confirmed the same thesis: here innovation is not a department — it is the connective tissue of the entire economy.

Shenzhen: the factory of the future and the global epicenter of hardware

If Beijing is the head and Shanghai the heart, Shenzhen is the hands. In forty years it went from fishing village to world capital of hardware. We opened with BYD, the world's largest manufacturer of electric vehicles and batteries: a campus where cars, batteries and electronics take shape under the same roof. Then the largest DJI flagship store on the planet — DJI, the global leader in drones.

The technological heart of this stop, though, was humanoid. At UBTECH Robotics we saw the Walker S2 in action, an industrial humanoid robot already in mass production: UBTECH is the first company in the world to get there, and it is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Right after, the startup EngineAI: two generations of innovators just a few hundred meters apart. That is the Shenzhen ecosystem. We then saw the supply chain laid bare at Huaqiangbei, the largest electronics component market in the world: kilometers of stalls where you can find any chip or sensor in existence, and where an idea becomes a prototype in days instead of months.

The final stop, at Tencent's headquarters, let us measure the scale of all this: the company behind WeChat, the app that in China is messaging, bank and digital identity all at once, where we were welcomed by the global relations team.

What all this means for us

I did not go to China to admire and come home empty-handed. I went — as we did in 2025 in Silicon Valley, visiting Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Meta and Nvidia — because I believe geographical boundaries are no longer a barrier. In a connected world, a community like ours can talk with the global protagonists of innovation and bring home ideas, contacts and method.

Three lessons I keep for myself and share with you. The first: China's advantage does not come from cost, but from the speed at which an idea travels through the entire supply chain. The second: the innovation that matters is not that of an isolated company, but of an ecosystem that connects companies, universities, capital and institutions — exactly what a foundation like ours is trying to build, on its own scale and with great ambition. The third, and most important: the future is not something you endure — it is something you steer. We can choose to remain spectators of change, or to join those who write it.

The decisions we make about technology today shape the way we will live tomorrow. That is why we will keep building bridges: between Italy and the frontiers of innovation, between the great global companies and people, between our communities and a future we cannot afford to miss. Whoever chooses to walk this bridge with us — by supporting the Foundation, joining our programs or simply sharing this story — will be among those who decided to lead, not to fall behind.

A journey like this is not something you do alone. The strength of the mission was its delegation: a team that brought together business, finance, public healthcare, universities, communications and the innovation world — proof that when a community works as a network, it can sit at the table with the global players.

Every year the Innovation Bridge Foundation — an ETS, Italy's nonprofit legal status — organizes study missions to the countries at the forefront of innovation.