The Chinese Communist Party’s top theoretical journal, Qiushi, used its newest issue to republish nearly a decade of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping’s speeches on manufacturing and what the Party calls the “real economy.” A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who helped draft the United States’ 2017 National Security Strategy argues it is geopolitics, not welfare. China, in her analysis, has spent more than a decade racing to dominate advanced manufacturing because Beijing believes control of that technology will decide who leads the next era of global competition — and the Party has shown it will accept money-losing investments to win that race.
A decade of speeches collected under one theme
Qiushi’s tenth issue of 2026 carries a lengthy article titled “Building a Stronger, Better, Bigger Real Economy,” compiling Xi’s remarks on manufacturing from December 2016 through December 2025.
He is quoted repeatedly pressing officials to “advance industrial modernization and raise the level of manufacturing,” to “accelerate the development of advanced manufacturing,” and to “deeply integrate the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence with the real economy.” He calls manufacturing “the foundation on which the nation stands and the basis on which it grows strong,” and vows to “unswervingly build China into a manufacturing power.”
If the campaign were about living standards, the article’s own closing line undercuts it. Xi’s last quoted remark calls for China to “remain undefeated amid the wind and waves,” a stock phrase from Party rhetoric about external threats.
The real target is regime stability, not people’s livelihoods
Xi’s invocation of unspecified dangers reveals the campaign’s real motive: not the welfare of Chinese citizens, but the durability of CCP rule. The Party has long claimed that hostile foreign powers are bent on its destruction — a fear it has carried since its founding.
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The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, a series of essays published by the Epoch Times cataloging the Party’s history of violence and deception, describes this directly: “From the day of its founding, the Communist Party has struggled from one crisis to the next. Its greatest crisis has always been a crisis of survival. To exist is to fear, an eternal sense of crisis. Fear born of crisis has become the Communist Party’s highest interest: the difficult task of preserving the Party’s existence and power as a ruling clique.”
Why Beijing will accept losses that American investors won’t
In a June 2026 Hudson Institute essay, “Don’t Let China Buy Into America’s Industrial Future,” Nadia Schadlow — former deputy national security adviser for strategy and a co-author of the 2017 National Security Strategy — wrote that modern manufacturing is no longer a matter of building more factories. A new industrial ecosystem is taking shape that fuses materials science, chemistry, hardware, software, robotics, artificial intelligence, and enormous flows of data. The factories of the future will not simply produce goods. They will generate information, shape supply chains, and determine military and economic advantage — at once production facilities and data systems.
The national security implications, she writes, are direct: Chinese companies continue acquiring firms across America’s industrial base while Beijing’s authoritarian system gives its own capital inherent advantages.
Schadlow cites research from the Rhodium Group showing that Beijing increasingly factors “non-market considerations” into investment decisions, often ranking strategic objectives above profitability. She writes, China, however, has demonstrated a willingness to tolerate lower returns in pursuit of strategic objectives. According to the Rhodium Group, Beijing has increasingly inserted ‘non-market considerations’ into investment decisions, prioritizing strategic goals at the expense of profitability. That creates an uneven playing field for American capital, which still largely operates under market expectations for returns and efficiency. Competing against a state-backed system willing to absorb losses could make it more difficult to sustain private investment in U.S. manufacturing.
Xi’s manufacturing push has nothing to do with raising living standards. The CCP can sustain money-losing industrial strategies because it has conscripted the entire Chinese population to cover the bill — those losses land on ordinary citizens. The Party has a phrase it repeats constantly in propaganda: “the people are the greatest source of confidence behind our rule.”
In slang that has spread across Chinese internet forums in recent years, ordinary citizens call themselves “leeks,” cut down again and again by those who profit from them; “oxen and horses,” beasts of burden worked without complaint; “slaves”; “cannon fodder”; “organ donors,” people whose entire value to the system lies in what can be extracted from them. The Party’s claim that the people are its “greatest source of confidence” is not reassurance. It is a description of the arrangement.
China is already the world’s largest market for industrial robots. Its latest five-year plan designates advanced manufacturing as the primary engine for raising productivity, built around what the Party calls “new quality productive forces”: growth driven by robotics, artificial intelligence, and intelligent manufacturing systems. A parallel “AI plus manufacturing” initiative aims to embed autonomous AI agent systems throughout production lines and supply chains. Beijing has set a target of integrating artificial intelligence into 90 percent of national economic activity by 2030.The Chinese Communist Party treats advanced manufacturing as a strategic asset, not a commercial industry. China is not a commercial competitor. It is a state. Any market it enters can be neither free nor fair.
