Manufacturing Technology Must Stay in Chinese Hands: Xi's Directive Tops the Boards

The No. 1 item on Baidu's hot-search board on Friday was not the Asian Games opening ceremony. It was a policy directive. "Solidly advance the high-quality development of advanced manufacturing" outpolled the ceremony in Nagoya, 7.9 million searches to 7.8 million, after the National Conference on Advanced Manufacturing, held in Beijing on September 16 and 17, conveyed leader Xi Jinping's latest instructions on the sector: keep making manufacturing good, "hold manufacturing technology in our own hands" (制造业技术要自己掌握), build a modern industrial system with advanced manufacturing as its backbone, and treat the real economy as the foundation of everything else.

The trending topic itself is a study in how such directives reach the public. China News Service dug up the signature anecdote: a May 2020 visit by Xi to a stainless-steel plant in Shanxi, where he picked up a sheet of "hand-tear steel" — foil 0.02 millimeters thick, thinner than a human hair — bent it lightly, and pronounced that "the craft is truly fine; like tinfoil, steel refined a hundred times over can be wound around a finger" (百炼钢做成了绕指柔). The foil's technology was long monopolized abroad, the post notes; it now serves aerospace, high-end electronics and new-energy products, and China's version is billed as world-leading. Local government accounts further down the feed, from a county in Jiangxi, simply stapled the directive's hashtags onto posts about police work and young scientists — the amplification chain that carries a policy line from the conference hall to every provincial feed.

For an international reader, the slogan is the story. "Technology in our own hands" is the organizing sentence of Chinese industrial policy — the same doctrine that runs the chip campaign, the domestic passenger-jet program and the electric-vehicle build-out the site has tracked in pieces such as DeepSeek's $2.56 billion order for Huawei silicon. What gives the directive its current edge is timing: it lands in a season of tightening export controls abroad and an explicit push to substitute domestic components at home, and it elevates "advanced manufacturing" — precision materials, chips, robots, aircraft — from one sector among many to the defined backbone of the entire industrial system.

The line in the directive that specialists will watch is a quieter one: "strengthen enterprises' position as the main body of innovation." Translated out of officialese, it assigns the technology race to companies rather than ministries — the state supplying the direction and the demand, firms supplying the breakthroughs. That is the model behind the hand-tear steel Xi praised five years ago, and behind the suppliers now racing to fill the gaps that sanctions carve.

A 0.02-millimeter sheet of steel makes for a better story than a communiqué, which is why state media keeps telling it. But the ranking tells its own truth: on a day when China's athletes were marching into a stadium in Japan, the item at the top of the country's biggest search board was about what the country will make, and who will own the making of it.