Elon Musk, on Chinese State TV, Tells the World to Go and See China
In an interview that aired as Xi Jinping arrived in the United States, Musk praised China's 'incredible magnificence,' credited Tesla's Shanghai factory to its Chinese team, and predicted a billion humanoid robots within a decade — and state television clipped it into a day-long sermon.
The week that President Xi Jinping flew to the United States for his second summit with Donald Trump, Chinese state television found another American to put on air: Elon Musk, in a sit-down interview with CCTV Finance that the network spent the whole of Tuesday slicing into standalone segments.
The parts that trended were the travel advice. Musk told viewers that anyone with spare time should come and see China for themselves — Shanghai, Beijing, Xi'an — and specifically to take the high-speed rail between them. Of a recent Beijing-to-Xi'an journey he said: "That was a great experience! You must look out the window, don't keep staring at your phone — there is so much to see." And he reached for superlatives: no words, he said, could adequately express "the incredible magnificence of China" (中国那种令人难以置信的壮丽). CCTV's own headline for the segment dropped the hedge entirely: "China's charm is beyond words!"
The timing was not subtle. The interview aired as Chinese and American officials were already talking trade in New York, ahead of Xi's state visit for a second meeting with Trump — and as a friendly billionaire's voice on state media, it did double duty as tourism promotion and soft diplomacy. The Baidu hot board carried a version of the quote at rank five, and Chinese state outlets ran the soundbites all day; Yicai, the business wire, alone carved the interview into four separate items.
The business substance sat inside the flattery. Musk credited the company's Shanghai Gigafactory — Tesla's largest — directly to its local workforce: "The success of the Shanghai factory rests on the Chinese team," he said, calling the plant a treasure. He then projected a robotics future at his characteristic scale: at least a billion humanoid robots within ten years, perhaps a hundred billion within twenty, each person commanding hundreds or thousands of them — machines that would care for elderly parents, mind children and tutor each pupil one-on-one. On artificial intelligence he was uncharacteristically modest, telling young people the core skill of the AI era would not be knowing answers but knowing how to ask questions.
The interview played well precisely because it confirmed what Chinese viewers already believe about their country's appeal. The reaction online was less astonishment than agreement. The auto journalist Han Lu reposted the clip with "what Ma said is right" (老马说的对啊) — using the affectionate nickname for Musk — and appended his own road-trip itinerary videos, one of them a meditative sequence of red-rock canyons and mist-filled valleys that functions, accidentally, as the perfect illustration of Musk's advice. The through-window shot from a Beijing-Xi'an train became the interview's shared image.
What a foreign reader should notice is who is vouching for whom. A Tesla chief executive whose company depends on its Chinese factory and its Chinese market is the most credible available Western voice for state television's case that China is worth seeing — and he was given the airtime on the exact week Beijing wanted that message travelling in the other direction too.