Year in Review (Part 2): Innovation, Competition and Trade Tensions Define China’s Industrial Sector

Technology, new energy and retail were among the most-talked-about areas, encapsulating the China-U.S. trade war, green transition and sluggish domestic demand

Photo: AI generated

For Chinese industry, 2024 was a year of innovation, fierce competition and heightened external pressure, as the nation strived to balance rapid technological development with increasingly hostile global trade dynamics and efforts to revive the domestic economy.

Technology, new energy and retail were among the sectors that filled the most column inches, encapsulating the China-U.S. trade war, green transition and sluggish domestic demand and everything in between.

Startups and titans alike rushed to develop and find applications for artificial intelligence (AI), building off the momentum of large language models (LLMs) that emerged en masse following OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But this was accompanied by mounting financial challenges and concerns over sustainability of loss-making startups, as competition for market share intensified.

Competition and policy also dogged the renewable energy sector, fueling unfettered expansion of China’s renewables capacity, hitting the balance sheets of equipment manufacturers who struggled to make a profit while maintaining market share.