Another great transformation is underway in China. The world’s factory is fast becoming its first electro-state, with an economy increasingly built on clean energy, AI, advanced manufacturing, and control of key strategic materials. This new model is full of promise, though it faces major challenges.

High import duties on Chinese goods have become the new normal for the United States. While there’s lots of talk about renewed stability with China after the presidents met in South Korea, but the world’s two largest economies appear to be learning how to live apart.

In the geopolitical theater of 2025, the United States’ trade posture toward China exemplifies a pattern of escalating threats that yield diminishing strategic returns.

Under China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, the coming period will be crucial for consolidating foundations and achieving socialist modernization. The country aims to leverage four key advantages: its institutional strengths, its vast domestic market, its complete industrial system and its abundant human resources.

China’s decision to forgo special rights in the WTO shows that it takes its great power responsibility seriously. It wants to advance trade cooperation with developed economies and with Global South. A trade upturn with the United States in 2026 is much anticipated.

Beijing’s announcement regarding future World Trade Organization negotiations is strategic. It represents both a willingness to promote WTO reform and an institutional adjustment to support high-quality domestic development and opening-up to the world.

China’s economic struggles have implications for its trading partners across the globe, notably in Europe. What can Beijing’s fight against ‘involution’ tell the world about its future trading prospects?

The special administrative region has become a pioneer in institutional and technological innovation. Its recent initiative represents a significant opportunity for the region and a crucial step in China’s broader efforts toward the internationalization of the yuan.

Chinese manufacturing has come a long way – and by some measures, it is stronger than ever. Whereas foreign-invested enterprises were the driving force behind China’s manufacturing exports 20 years ago, most of these firms are now leaving China, having lost their market share to domestic competitors. And these dominant Chinese companies are not limited to the low-value-added production of the past. They are global leaders in many high-tech industries, such as semiconductors and electric vehicles, where they hold an absolute price advantage.

China’s economy today bears an unsettling resemblance to Japan’s in the 1990s, when the collapse of a housing bubble led to prolonged stagnation. But Japan’s “lost decades” were not the inevitable result of irreversible trends; they reflected policy blunders, rooted in a flawed understanding of the challenges the economy faced. Will Chinese policymakers make the same mistakes?