As global market uncertainties are rising and the supply chain is being reshaped, many multinational companies are searching for alternative manufacturing and consumer markets in an attempt to find the "next China."

The CBD area of Beijing, China Photo: VCG

However, Joe Ngai, McKinsey's Greater China chair, said in a recent interview with the US financial magazine Fortune: "You heard all these things. We're trying to diversify away from China. We're trying to de-risk from China. You can't find another China. There's no other China out there now," Ngai described China as "the world's toughest gym," training hyper-competitive companies.

The remarks are not a denial of the growth potential of other economies in the world, but rather a statement that, globally, no country can perfectly replicate China's unique advantages across manufacturing, market and technological innovation.

Among the major economies that contribute to the world's future growth, industrial innovation and investment opportunities, China remains a "must-have" or indispensable option.

After decades of development, China has built the world's most complete and comprehensive industrial system, forming a full-chain supporting structure that runs from raw materials and core components to nearly all end products. In the latest round of the World Economic Forum's Global Lighthouse Network enterprises, half of the 16 newly added enterprises came from China. Shenzhen and the broader Guangdong Province have completed the transformation from the world's factory to a pace-setter of global industrial standards.

Compared with other emerging market economies, China's industrial chain is more capable to achieve highly-efficient closed-loop production and take on high-end manufacturing. Relying on its mature innovation ecosystem, China's speed and scale of innovation are hard to be matched across the four high-growth, high-return frontiers identified by McKinsey -- artificial intelligence infrastructure, electrification, smart hardware level, and the broadly-defined digitalization.

The advantages of a super-large market and a healthy competitive environment in China have helped forge a continuously iterating innovation environment. Currently, the conception that the Chinese market is "the world's most hardcore gym" is winning recognition from a growing number of multinational companies.

Consumers' high acceptance of new products and new technologies compels companies to keep iterating their technology and optimizing their products. In the past, foreign brands could make an easy profit by relying on the so-called product premiums; today, the rapid rise of Chinese enterprises such as Huawei, BYD and miHoYo is driving more multinationals to pursue an "in China, for China" localization strategy and lead them to integrate deeply into China's local supply chain.

Fierce market competition produces globally competitive companies, and those Chinese corporate brands winning in fierce domestic market competition naturally possess greater resilience when they go overseas. This is also an important reason why Chinese products can maintain both competitive pricing and good quality in overseas markets.

And, scale dividends and the potential for regional collaboration open up long-term growth space. China possesses irreplaceable advantages in scale and market size, enabling it to undertake innovation and research and development of greater strategic magnitude and importance. And, at the same time, China can play the role of an ecosystem aggregator, building systems of regional division of labor.

In the face of an entirely new landscape, the development logic of multinational companies is being rewritten. Only by adhering to "in China, for China" — embedding with the local market, integrating into the local industrial ecosystem, and pursuing collaborative innovation hand in hand with local partners — can they adapt to the rhythm of the Chinese market, gain a firm business footing, and form a sound ecosystem in which multiple parties can realize win-win-win.

China's economy boasts ample resilience, strong innovation momentum and a very solid industrial foundation, combining the triple gems of high-quality manufacturing, consumption and innovation. To obtain genuine growth opportunities, multinational companies need to be deeply rooted in China's constantly-upgrading massive market.

This was translated and compiled by the Global Times, based on an article originally published on by the peopledaily.com on June 28, 2026.