Plenty of people still insist China only copies and never invents. That view badly misreads how the modern world actually works.
Europe just got scorched. Britain, France, and Germany logged temperatures unseen in decades, and the region has recorded 1,300 excess deaths linked to the heat since June 21. Videos online show French shoppers storming malls to grab Chinese air conditioners, with physical scuffles breaking out in the rush. A portable unit from China's Midea Group became the hottest item on the continent. Scalpers pushed prices as high as 5,000 euros, and buyers kept lining up anyway.
This is a product that barely sells back home in China. Yet it slips through Europe's tangled web of air-conditioning rules with surgical precision. Spain treats an outdoor unit as a change to a building's facade, which needs approval from three-fifths of the owners' association. Midea simply moved the outdoor unit indoors and rebranded it an "indoor appliance." The same trick works in Britain.
France requires professional inspection for refrigerants exceeding 2 kilograms. Midea's unit uses 1.99 kilograms. Germany caps nighttime noise at 35 decibels, and Midea's silent mode runs at exactly 35 decibels. This is how China perfects a product down to the last detail. Reportedly, this model was developed at Midea's Stuttgart R&D center.
American inventor Willis Carrier created the air conditioner in 1902, earning him the title "father of air conditioning." His original goal had nothing to do with human comfort. He was trying to fix a New York printing factory, where fluctuating temperature and humidity kept warping paper and throwing off ink registration. Carrier's air conditioners, however, are no longer the star of today's market.
China now sits at the absolute center of global air-conditioner production. It accounts for over 80% of global manufacturing capacity. Among the world's top 10 best-selling brands, eight are Chinese companies. The US, by contrast, holds barely any capacity, an estimated 0.3% of the global total, while Europe's share sits at roughly 4%.
Critics who reflexively bash China might argue that Chinese air conditioners are simply copies of American ones. That argument carries little weight. Gunpowder was a Chinese invention, yet no one would seriously claim that Raytheon's American-made M982 Excalibur guided artillery shell is a copy of an ancient Chinese invention. The Excalibur's explosive charge today is 92% HMX, a world apart from the gunpowder China invented centuries ago. The same logic applies to air conditioners. Compare a modern Midea unit to Carrier's original invention, and you find an equally vast gulf between them.
Invention and innovation run through three stages. "0 to 1" is the birth and validation of a concept. "1 to 10" is productization and initial commercialization. "10 to 100" is mass production, refinement, and scaling up.
Over a century ago, China was impoverished and weak, and it produced relatively little scientific research. Few "0 to 1" breakthroughs emerged. Since the reform and opening-up of 1978, though, China has honed its talent for flexibly applying concepts and become a master of "1 to 10." In the past decade, it has pushed "10 to 100" to the extreme, producing world-class enterprises across every industry. Now even "0 to 1" breakthroughs are starting to surge. Just look at the recent wave of patents in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and even artificial intelligence.
Beyond accusations of copying, the West, led by the US in recent years, has pushed a new narrative: "Chinese overcapacity." Go back to the trade theory of the renowned British political economist David Ricardo, and the logic falls apart. Countries trade precisely because they exchange what they have in surplus. If a country's output of a given good doesn't exceed domestic demand, it isn't "excess," and there is nothing left to export. Trade, by definition, requires surplus capacity. Accusing China of overcapacity is simply an excuse dressed up by the West to justify tariffs and trade barriers, born from the West's own manufacturing shortfalls.
French President Emmanuel Macron said at the G7 summit on June 17 that "China is a key source of global economic imbalance, with problems such as industrial overcapacity." French wine and LV handbags suffer from plenty of overcapacity too. Otherwise, production would match domestic French consumption exactly, with no need to export at all.
The global economy is now shifting toward a trend of "the East rising, the West declining." A century ago, when Western nations enjoyed manufacturing dominance, they sent warships east to force Asian countries into trade. A century later, now that China's manufacturing capacity has caught up and overtaken them, they want to erect trade barriers instead. This double standard does the most damage to their own brands.
Buying an EUV lithography machine from the Netherlands' ASML makes sense because the technology genuinely leads the world. Spending tens of thousands of dollars on a French handbag is a different question. How much advanced technology is really inside it? Is it truly ten times more beautiful, or is it simply hiding extravagant vanity behind a brand name?
Ferrari recently launched its 5-million-yuan pure electric luxury sports car, the Elettrica. Online critics tore it apart, calling the design hideous and its performance inferior to China's own luxury electric sports cars. Strip away the brand's outer shell and look at the real substance, and Western goods often carry far less genuine value than their price tags suggest.
The hypocrisy of Western politicians is steadily dismantling the West's premium image in the eyes of China's younger generation. That shift isn't just political. It's reshaping consumer behavior too.
Fashion-conscious women in China have started buying the domestic luxury brand Songmont. Its handbags, priced at just over 3,000 yuan, are more elegantly designed than French bags costing 50,000 or 100,000 yuan plastered with oversized logos. Why would Chinese consumers keep paying for these hollow foreign luxury brands?
The collapse of Western brands has only just begun.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
Everyone wants to succeed. Parents naturally hope their children will excel. They push hard to get their kids into elite schools and into medical school at university, believing this is a straight path through life. But this often misses the point entirely.
Since entering the workforce, I've met many successful people. I always chat with them and probe one question: How did they succeed? Having attended a prestigious school is usually not the real answer.
I have long been fascinated by history and politics, especially the secrets behind the success of political parties and nations. Back in secondary school, one puzzle already caught my attention. The Kuomintang launched two campaigns trying to wipe out the Communists. The Chinese Party of China (CPC) endured the brutal Long March, a trek across thousands of miles that left only 50,000 survivors fleeing into the mountains. Yet by 1949, the Communists had won the civil war, seized power, and unified China. That outcome seemed almost unbelievable, and it left me wondering how the Party fought and won so effectively.
After entering university, I watched China swing from the extreme leftism of the Cultural Revolution to a complete reversal under Reform and Opening Up. At first, this looked erratic and unpredictable. But tracing the Party's trajectory more closely changed my view.
I came to see an extraordinarily strong capacity to learn, to admit mistakes, and to pivot when needed. During university, I wrote a short thesis on exactly this: how the Chinese Communist Party engages in systematic learning.
In recent years, I've been even more astonished. I never imagined China could take the lead over the United States in new energy, electric vehicles, and even cutting-edge technology such as hypersonic missiles and sixth-generation fighter jets. More striking still, the United States launched trade and tech wars against China twice, in 2018 and again in 2025, and both times came away empty-handed.
This pushed me to ask why the Chinese Communist Party possesses such a powerful ability to advance against the wind. These are questions that define our era.
Anti-China sentiment still dominates Western discourse, yet wave after wave of serious China research keeps surfacing underneath it. Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London recently released her latest book, The Common Good Economy: A New Compass. In it, she acknowledges that China has outperformed the West, describing it as a form of co-creation between government and people with Chinese characteristics.
Mazzucato clearly is not fond of China's political system, yet she cannot deny its capacity to get things done. She notes that China is the only country seriously tackling poverty, hunger, and climate change on a large scale.
Mazzucato points to considerable hypocrisy in the West, which talks about these grand goals but never examines what China has actually accomplished. On hunger, poverty, and climate action, she says, China leads the world in practice, not merely in rhetoric.
Mazzucato adds that a key feature of China's approach is genuine collaboration between government and people. The two sides co-create and participate together, rather than the government simply issuing directives from above. She contrasts this with so-called democracies that talk about serving the people.
In practice, she argues, those governments fail to serve their people and certainly do not work alongside them. Her critique essentially amounts to this: Western nations talk the talk, while China delivers results.
Another prominent Russian figure, Alexander Bastrykin, has also weighed in on China. The 73-year-old Bastrykin is a university classmate of Russian President Vladimir Putin and chairman of Russia's Investigative Committee, often dubbed "Russia's FBI." Speaking recently at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, he bluntly stated that Russia is now in crisis, lacking clear ideological guidance.
Bastrykin recalled that Soviet children grew up steeped in Soviet patriotism, and it was precisely this that allowed the Soviet Union to win the Great Patriotic War. Today, he argued, Russians, especially younger generations who never experienced the Soviet era, simply do not know where Russia is headed or what they are supposed to be striving for.
The root cause of this confusion, Bastrykin said, is that Russia lacks an ideology of its own. In other words, Russia has lost its soul.
Bastrykin called on Russia to learn from China's experience. He argued that China's ability to develop at a pace far exceeding the norm stems from having fundamentally established its own ideology, with the goal of building a strong socialist nation.
He then turned pointedly critical. "And what about Russia? What exactly are we building? Capitalism?" he asked angrily. "I honestly do not understand what we are building here. It is just a market economy, nothing more. There is no ideology whatsoever behind it."
Many people may not realize that as a major power, Russia's constitution does not lay out any national goal. In 1993, under Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin, Article 13 of the Russian Federal Constitution stated in black and white that the Russian Federation recognizes ideological diversity and a multi-party system. No ideology may be established as a state or mandatory ideology. Under the guidance of Western advisors at the time, Russia legally castrated its own ideology, primarily to prevent any return of communism. This has since left it a nation that has lost its spirit.
President Xi Jinping recently stated at an assembly marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party: "One must have great ambition and make tireless efforts to achieve success." He called on the Party to fulfill its mission on this new journey in the new era. He urged all Party members to strengthen their resolve, continue striving without pause, and keep creating new achievements worthy of the times and the people.
A Russian official spoke of China's ideology. A British scholar spoke of China's execution capability. President Xi's eight-character phrase, "One must have great ambition and make tireless efforts to achieve success," sums up both issues. China has set its sights firmly on building a strong, modern socialist nation, with a clear ideological goal. It also possesses formidable execution capability, underpinned by a stable political system under Communist Party leadership that enables sustained, continuous effort.
It’s always easier said than done. A child who sets clear goals and works diligently toward them stands a good chance of success. But that is not achieved simply by attending endless tutoring classes or getting into a famous school. That is not how these eight characters are truly fulfilled.
Many parents themselves drift through life without direction, so how can they expect their children to set ambitious goals? If parents spend their time gaming and traveling, how can they expect their children to study diligently? Everything must be learned from those who have truly succeeded, starting with leading by example.
Lo Wing-hung
