How China is building the backbone of a modern industrial system

At a super smart factory for industrial humanoid robots of UBTECH Robotics in Liuzhou, south China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, a worker inspects robots nearing the end of the production line. (Photo/Li Hanchi)

China vigorously develops advanced manufacturing and takes innovation as its guide. With higher technological sophistication and accelerated transition toward smarter, greener, and more integrated development, the country seeks to modernize production methods. It coordinates traditional, emerging, and future industries.

These coordinated efforts are driving Chinese manufacturing toward a comprehensive leap forward, establishing advanced manufacturing as the foundational pillar of a modern industrial system.

At the heart of this transformation lies innovation.

In September, Chinese tech giant Huawei unveiled its second-generation flagship tri-fold smartphone, and Xiaomi released its first "mid-fold" handset. Chinese smartphone makers are thus competing fiercely in the high-end segment.

The confidence stems from domestically driven breakthroughs. In recent years, China has achieved mass production of ultra-thin flexible glass. Just 30 micrometers thick, it can withstand more than one million folds without damage.

By late July, China held 5.74 million valid domestic invention patents. The number of international patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty has ranked first in the world for seven consecutive years.

To accelerate commercialization, China is strengthening the linkage between scientific research and industrial application, improving the efficiency of turning innovations into market-ready products.

For instance, while computed tomography (CT) imaging has evolved over a century to offer increasingly precise detection, the rapid surge in new energy vehicle production created a bottleneck in battery quality control.

Responding to this challenge, Sunwoda Electronic Co., Ltd., in collaboration with Dalian University of Technology, has successfully developed high-speed, multimodal CT equipment for online battery inspection. The system enables non-destructive testing and significantly boosts evaluation efficiency.

Since the beginning of this year, China has accelerated the development of a full-chain service system for translating scientific and technological advances into practical applications.

Technicians debug special-purpose robots at a tech firm in Ma'anshan, east China's Anhui province. (Photo/Wang Wensheng)

At the R&D stage, two new national manufacturing innovation centers have been established. At the pilot-testing stage, a national network now includes 21 top-tier manufacturing platforms and over 1,800 reserve facilities. In the incubation stage, the country has recognized its first batch of 14 excellence-level and 402 standard-level technology business incubators, which have incubated more than 425,000 enterprises and teams.

Reflecting these gains, the World Intellectual Property Organization's 2026 Global Innovation Index reports that China hosts 25 of the world's top 100 innovation clusters, the highest number globally for the fourth year running.

What distinguishes an advanced manufacturing facility from a conventional factory?

Consider Lenovo's production hub in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province, which processes over 5,000 daily orders, 60 percent of which are highly customized across more than 50 product lines and 20,000 configurations. Despite this complexity, the 100-meter production line operates with remarkable agility. Equipped with machine-vision-guided robotic arms, it performs precision assembly at millimeter-level accuracy and switches between product models with minimal downtime. Ninety percent of orders ship within 24 hours.

What makes advanced manufacturing "advanced" lies in the modernization of production methods.

"Compared with traditional manufacturing, advanced manufacturing has generally shifted toward digitalized, intelligent, lean, and green production," said Li Yan, deputy head of the department responsible for researching the industrial economy with the Development Research Center of the State Council.

China now operates 35,000 basic-level smart factories, more than 8,200 advanced-level smart factories, and more than 500 excellence-level smart factories. More than 30 percent of manufacturing enterprises above designated size with an annual revenue exceeding 20 million yuan (about $2.98 million) are now applying artificial intelligence technologies.

Global industrial competition is no longer limited to production capacity; it now encompasses integrated manufacturing and service ecosystems. Chinese leading heavy machinery manufacturer Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group, for example, expanded beyond equipment sales to deliver comprehensive green mining solutions, securing major contracts with global firms such as BHP.

Similarly, Haier Smart Home provides tailored smart home appliance packages, with revenue generated from scenario-based applications continuing to grow.

A worker operates spinning machinery via a tablet computer in a smart production workshop of a textile company in Ganzhou, east China's Jiangxi province. (Photo/Shi Yu)

"Going forward, we will promote deeper integration between advanced manufacturing and modern services, accelerate the development of new models and new forms of business such as platform-based design and personalized customization, and advance the development of service-oriented manufacturing," said Xin Guobin, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Ultimately, what makes advanced manufacturing "advanced" is the optimization of the industrial structure.

What else can an embroidery machine do besides embroidery?

It can serve embodied intelligence. The machine interweaves sensing yarn and base yarn, knitting embodied intelligence data gloves as one piece and enabling more precise capture of hand motion data.

"The essence of advanced manufacturing is comprehensive innovation and upgrading across the manufacturing sector," Li said. Advanced manufacturing includes both manufacturing industries created by new technological breakthroughs and traditional manufacturing industries that have been comprehensively transformed and reshaped through the application of advanced technologies, processes and production and management methods.

Driven by this momentum, traditional industries are experiencing renewed vitality. In the first half of this year, sales revenue in food manufacturing, garment manufacturing, and papermaking grew 11.6 percent, 9.2 percent, and 8.9 percent year on year, respectively. Meanwhile, emerging and future industries are expanding rapidly: China accounts for nearly 70 percent of global sales of quadruped robots; more than 400 humanoid robot models have been developed in China, accounting for more than half of the global total; and the preclinical R&D cycle for new drugs such as targeted anticancer therapies has been shortened by 40 percent.

As China boosts advanced manufacturing, it presses forward with a commitment to pursuing excellence and speeds up the development of a modern industrial system, where this sector serves as its backbone.