In just forty years, China has transformed from a closed economy into a global powerhouse. Riding the tailwinds of its massive labor supply, aggressive infrastructure investment, and ingrained work ethic, the nation became a haven of opportunity. However, more recently, shifting demographics, less torrid growth, and an increasingly complex geopolitical environment have caused some to wonder: Where lies the next China? The authors of this book have a bold and unequivocal answer: the next China is still China.

There is no substitute for the Chinese market. China accounts for a staggering 30% of global manufacturing and 18% of global GDP, surpassing the European Union and trailing only the United States. With nearly five million STEM graduates each year (more than the total number of US degree graduates across all fields!), China is well-positioned in an era of technological automation, artificial intelligence, and data-powered innovation. However, the strategies that once propelled businesses to success in China are no longer sufficient. A new playbook is needed.

The Next China Is Still China upends conventional wisdom, providing fresh actionable strategies for winning in the years ahead.

The excerpt below is the book's prologue. 

◊◊◊◊◊

In January 2023, at the World Economic Forum—the annual, invitation-only gathering of global business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland—several dozen Asia-focused CEOs and senior executives of the world’s largest companies gathered for a private dinner. The topic of the evening: China.

The gathering was hosted by McKinsey & Company and moderated by Joe Ngai, the Firm’s Greater China chairman and one of this book’s co-authors. He’d led dozens of similar discussions over the years, but the mood that night was different. The executives in the room were leaders who’d invested heavily in—and benefited from—China’s rise of the past two decades. Collectively, they commanded operations employing tens of thousands, supply chains spanning dozens of provinces, brands recognized globally from Shanghai to London to Abu Dhabi. And yet, for the first time in memory, the conversation wasn’t about growth targets or market expansion; it was about whether their China strategies still worked at all. Questions came quickly, circling what we’d titled the evening’s discussion: “unprecedented headwinds”—or the collision of economic uncertainty, geopolitical tension, and rapid technological change: When would China’s housing downturn stabilize? Should our board be anxious about the slowdown in consumer confidence? Do we expand India operations as a hedge to China?

Beneath each question lay the same unease: whether China’s role as the engine of global growth—the foundation upon which so much progress had been built—was coming to an end. After guests stepped back out into the snow, a journalist lingered in the hallway and asked Joe what had become a recurrent boardroom query: “If this is the reality now,” he said, “where does the next opportunity lie?” The question followed naturally: “What’s the next China?”

The query, of course, wasn’t philosophical but practical. Which country—or combination of countries—would replace China as the world’s next engine of growth, profits, and scale? Throughout the week at Davos, the notion “China + 1” dominated private conversations—the imperative of finding alternatives to China as the country labored through geopolitical challenges, overcapacity, weakening sentiment from consumers and investors alike, and rapid technological change.

While Joe fielded questions in Davos, Nick Leung—his predecessor as McKinsey’s China head and this book’s other co-author—was halfway around the world in Shenzhen, the glass-and-steel city at the heart of China’s manufacturing ecosystem. He was leading a procurement workshop for a multinational client whose China footprint was foundational to its competitive advantage—dense supplier networks, specialized tooling clusters, production lines calibrated for speed and precision, and a labor force that could scale up or down by the hour. The stakes were high enough to draw the global CEO into the room.

The directive from headquarters was clear: find an alternative. Costs were rising. Policy risk felt harder to navigate. The company needed options, and it needed them now. Nick and his teams had spent months stress-testing scenarios. Yet every alternative led to the same judgment: “There are no great substitutes—we must choose the least bad option.” In other countries, the promise of stability and efficiency proved fragile. Rising wages and input costs eroded gains. The frictions of “friend-shoring”—logistical delays, substandard infrastructure, quality inconsistencies, a lack of institutional knowledge—piled up. Finally, the CEO voiced what everyone in the room was thinking: “We’re starting to realize how much we’ve taken China’s ecosystem for granted.”

No other country pairs the world’s most advanced supply chains with its largest consumer base. In China, companies can launch faster, adjust in real time, and iterate—refining and improving with each repetition—inside of a digitally connected, highly competitive marketplace in which innovation is a condition of survival. Is it any wonder, then, that this combination of scale, speed, and depth has proven so hard to find elsewhere?

Against this backdrop, a pattern began to emerge. In Davos, executives were asking “What’s the next China?” In Shenzhen, Nick was watching a client discover there were no good answers. Across dozens of similar conversations, in boardrooms, forums, workshops, the same reality kept surfacing. The companies searching hardest for alternatives were having trouble finding the answers they wanted—not because China was getting easier, but because replicating what China has to offer proved impossible anywhere else.

The realization crystallized six weeks after Davos, on a flight over the South China Sea. The conclusion felt almost too simple: The next China is China.

Joe posted it on LinkedIn, expecting a ripple. Instead, it exploded. The phrase had circulated before, rolled out whenever an obstacle had emerged or a sector lulled. This time, it landed differently, generating more than twenty-eight thousand mentions across Chinese and global media, from the China Daily to CNBC to Bloomberg. Over the months that followed, multinational and Chinese clients alike began asking us to take the idea into board and investor meetings. A consumer goods CEO asked us to brief the board on whether the “consumer depression” headlines were real. A private equity founder invited us to his limited partners investor day to discuss which segments remain investable. An entrepreneur asked, over lunch, how to reorganize his company for overseas growth.

We’ve been careful—then and now—to be precise about what we’re saying. Growth in China is slowing. The economy is maturing. Competition is intense, corporate debt has climbed, and weaker consumer confidence has struggled to offset the economic drag from a prolonged property downturn. This isn’t the China of 2010 or even 2019. It’s a reset, and the contrast with the past two decades of breakneck growth feels jarring.

But the numbers tell a more durable story. At just 2 percent annual growth, China would add output over the next decade equivalent to today’s entire Indian economy; at 5 percent—the government’s target—it would be like adding an India, Japan, and Indonesia combined. Already the world’s second biggest economy and the largest by purchasing power parity (PPP), China is the top trading partner for more than 120 countries—far more than any other single economy—and accounts for about 30 percent of global growth.

No collection of “speedboats” can displace the same water moved by a supertanker. In terms of raw growth, beyond its former quantitative role, China is likely to play a larger role qualitatively—increasingly shaping the technologies, business models, and industries of the future. Its companies are among the leaders in sixteen of the eighteen high-growth “arenas of competition” that McKinsey identifies as future engines of global value—from AI software and cloud infrastructure to electric vehicles, e-commerce, and consumer internet.

We’re not suggesting competing in the next China will be easy—if anything, it’ll be harder. The bar for success has risen, outcomes will diverge more sharply, and only companies willing to fundamentally rethink how they compete will endure. This transition to the next China will be both macroeconomic—from hard manufacturing toward services and IP creation—and microeconomic, demanding new capabilities: operating across borders, building and defending global footprints and brands, managing IP at scale, and embedding AI and robotics. For Chinese firms, it means extending global reach and organizational sophistication; for foreign multinationals, it means moving beyond merely selling into China toward partnering and building within its innovative ecosystems. For both, the rewards remain significant for those that can continue to adapt.

We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all playbooks. Consider this book a navigator’s chart—drawn from decades of experience in China—which maps long-running currents as well as hidden risks. The forces we describe will persist, but tactics, timing, and execution must constantly evolve.

We hope you’ll come along for the ride. As we will show, understanding how to compete and win in China will equip you to succeed anywhere. The next China is still China; the real question is whether it’s for you.

Excerpted from The Next China Is Still China: An Insider's Playbook for Winning in the New Era, published by Scribner. All rights reserved.  

About the Authors

Joe Ngai is a McKinsey senior partner and chairman of the firm’s offices in Greater China. He has led large-scale transformations for Chinese and multinational organizations and advises many of the top corporate leaders in the region. Frequently seen on media such as CNBC and Bloomberg, he has been named one of Forbes China’s 100 Most Influential Chinese Leaders, and he has also appeared on Bloomberg Businessweek China’s “Person of the Year 2025” list. He has an AB, JD, and MBA from Harvard University.

Nick Leung is a McKinsey senior partner and member of McKinsey’s global board of directors. He is also a lead-director of the McKinsey Global Institute, the firm’s independent research arm, where he directs research on macroeconomics, global trade, and geopolitics. Based in Asia since 1997, Nick served for twelve years as chairman of McKinsey’s offices in Greater China, where he led the region through its fastest growth period. He has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the London School of Economics.