The Chinese government announced the ‘Made in China 2025’ strategic plan in 2015. Aimed at closing the gap with Western hi-tech prowess and lessening China’s dependency on imported technology, it specified 10 areas where the country should take the lead. But as the trade war between the US and China heated up in mutual rounds of punitive tariffs, the plan became a focus of Washington’s discontent with Beijing

the first of three phases, ‘Made in China 2025’ is a ten-year plan

The reality

After the meteoric rise of recent years, China’s economy now faces a number of potential issues. Maligned as ‘big, but not powerful’, the manufacturing sector in particular has reached a bottleneck, with a slowdown in sales of cheap exports like shoes and toys. Many of these products have reached market saturation and it is hard to keep sales buoyant in sectors requiring little innovation or hi-tech development. What is more, the country’s working-age population is expected to fall sharply by 2030 as a result of the ‘one-child’ policy

‘MADE IN CHINA’ CHANGES

China travelled a long and hard road to establish itself as the world’s largest export economy, and the ‘made in China’ tag is now assigned to more sophisticated products than was the case two decades ago. In 1996, Chinese exports were largely textiles and footwear. But by 2016, computers, telephones and other electrical devices began to dominate the export list