This year, World Bank data confirmed a turning point: China officially surpassed the United States and became the world’s largest manufacturing country.
By 2024, this number has risen to $4.16 trillion – more than the combined total of the United States, Germany, and India (a total of $4.116 trillion).
From 2010 to the present, China has ranked first in the global manufacturing industry for 15 consecutive years, accounting for 28%-30% of the global share.
“Quantitative changes” in scale have continued to accumulate over the past decade or so, forming the first set of coordinates for understanding the current positioning of China’s manufacturing industry.
Under the leadership in scale, what is more worthy of attention is the structural advantage segmentation.
McKinsey report data shows that the added value of the U.S. manufacturing industry in 2024 will be approximately 2.49 trillion U.S. dollars, Germany will be approximately 0.845 trillion U.S. dollars, and India will be approximately 0.781 trillion U.S. dollars.
China’s US$4.16 trillion not only exceeds the combination of the United States + Germany + India, but also widens the gap with other major economies.
This advantage is evenly distributed across segments.
For every four new cars sold globally, one is a new energy vehicle, and Chinese brands account for 62% of global light electric vehicle sales and 71% of production.
The power battery track is also crowded: CATL ranks first with a global market share of 39.2%. In 2025, Chinese companies will account for up to 94.4% of global energy storage battery shipments, and the top ten companies are all from China.
In the photovoltaic field, the global production capacity of polysilicon, silicon wafers and batteries accounts for more than 90%.
In 2025, China’s new offshore wind power grid-connected capacity will account for 78% of the world’s total, and its cumulative grid-connected scale will account for 56% of the world’s.
China is currently the only country in the world that has all industrial categories in the United Nations Industrial Classification.
It can be seen from the comparison of several sets of data that the continuous rise of China’s manufacturing is not a single-dimensional increase, but the result of the superposition of technology, scale and structure of multiple industrial chains.
Accompanying this are voices from different positions and regions.
McKinsey pointed out in the report that China’s manufacturing industry has expanded from traditional daily necessities to the fields of automobiles, electronics, and mechanical equipment. In particular, new energy vehicles have formed substantial competitive pressure on traditional European and American car companies with their technological iteration and scale advantages.
The World Bank emphasizes that China is upgrading from the “OEM model” to an important global supplier of intermediate goods and capital goods. From 2021 to 2025, the added value of high-tech manufacturing will grow at an average annual rate of 9.2%, and the equipment manufacturing industry will grow at an average annual rate of 8.4%.
The vocabulary used by international media has also undergone a significant shift in recent years.
When reporting on the overseas expansion of China’s new energy vehicles, Reuters, BBC, Financial Times and other media have repeatedly used expressions such as “technological acceleration” and “systematic catch-up”, revealing strategic anxiety about the upgrading of China’s manufacturing industry.
BYD’s sales in Europe surged by 270% in 2025, and in the first five months of 2026, imports alone exceeded 100,000 vehicles.
95% of the British electric two-wheeler market comes from China, and overseas orders for some Chinese brands have increased by about 70% year-on-year.
However, not all reviews are praise.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report in June 2026, claiming that China’s market share growth in 15 key areas such as automobiles and solar energy can be attributed to government subsidies.
China’s Ministry of Commerce responded that the report’s “concept definition is not rigorous and the sample selection is biased,” and pointed out that such industrial support measures are also common in European and American economies.
Taking the mass production of BOE’s 8.6th-generation AMOLED production line as an example, a more specific signal can be observed.
On June 17, 2026, this glass substrate production line with a total investment of 63 billion yuan and a designed monthly production capacity of 32,000 pieces was officially put into mass production in Chengdu. It became the first generation 8.6 AMOLED production line in the world to be put into mass production, and was ahead of similar production lines in South Korea.
The technical significance of this breakthrough is that it extends the reach of my country’s OLED industry from small-size mobile phone screens to medium-sized IT fields such as laptops and tablets.
The production line is compatible with both flexible OLED and Hybrid OLED dual processes. It is equipped with LTPO adaptive frequency conversion technology (1-240Hz) and Tandem stacked light-emitting process. It reduces power consumption by 20%-30% and extends lifespan by 3-4 times.
The first batch of products has been delivered to more than ten brands including Lenovo, Asus, and Xiaomi.
Geng Yi, chief researcher in the display field of CCID Research Institute, commented that this mass production “realized the expansion of my country’s AMOLED displays from small to medium sizes.”
But this leading position is not stable – the only countries in the world that have deployed 8.6-generation AMOLED production lines are China and South Korea, which means that competition will be fully launched on the same generation technology platform.
The China (Hainan) Reform and Development Institute pointed out in an analysis that China’s manufacturing needs to be consolidated in three ways in the future: empowering the entire production process with AI technology, building a global collaboration network relying on the domestic market and free trade agreements, and promoting the transformation of the manufacturing industry from pure product manufacturing to an integrated service provider of design, R&D, IP operations, and global distribution.
From surpassing the United States in 2010 to US$4.16 trillion in 2024, and then to the blooming of multiple subdivisions such as OLED, power batteries, and offshore wind power, China’s manufacturing industry has completed a leap from “quantity” accumulation to “quality” in the past 15 years.
But as the McKinsey report implicitly reminds – industrial leadership does not mean leadership in all fields.
From a “global manufacturing center” to a “global innovation center”, this never-ending race continues.
