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
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