No matter how much you read about China, it’s still hard to wrap your head around the fact that they’re dominant across so many different industries. It’s even crazier that Western companies are being forced to go hat in hand begging for their technology. What a stunning reversal of fortunes. It was China that was doing the begging when it was starting its development journey.

This is not just happening in the automotive industry. In biotech, western pharmaceutical companies are signing billions of dollars in licensing deals to access intellectual property from Chinese drugmakers, reaching $41.5bn in 2024. In robotics, American start-ups are building with Chinese hardware platforms, such as Unitree’s nimble G1 humanoid robot. In AI, Chinese open-source models such as Alibaba’s Qwen series are being used by developers in the US.

Meta’s recent acquisition of agentic AI start-up Manus offers a striking case study. At the end of 2025, Meta announced it was buying Manus in a deal reportedly valued at more than $2bn, delivering a windfall for the start-up’s early Chinese investors such as Tencent and HSG. In an intensifying AI race, one of America’s biggest tech companies turned to a start-up founded in China in order to gain an edge.