Xiaomi’s car factory in Daxing, Beijing, has become America’s elite class’s new Jerusalem.

Title: Xiaomi’s Car Factory in Daxing, Beijing, Has Become the New Jerusalem for America’s Elite

Author: Dongcha Beating

Source:

Repost: Mars Finance

Since 2025, visits to Xiaomi’s car factory in Daxing, Beijing, have become one of the top activities for American elite families bringing their children to China. Every Saturday afternoon, at the factory entrance, you can always see American parents speaking English with their children, queuing up to enter this Chinese car production line.

Here, tour slots are extremely hard to get. Each event attracts up to 4,600 applicants, but only 20 groups are allowed in, with a lottery chance of 0.4%, comparable to Ivy League admissions.

According to publicly available data from the Beijing municipal government, in the first six months of 2025 alone, the factory received a total of 93k visitors; by the end of 2025, this number soared to 130k. Visitors come from over 70 countries and regions, including politicians, diplomats, multinational executives, Silicon Valley investors, European venture capitalists, and groups of American elite families.

What exactly has turned a car production line into a highly sought-after attraction?

Cognitive Shift

Over the past few decades, Western perceptions of China have always been built on a set of traditional cognitive infrastructure.

This infrastructure includes media framing (the filters of CNN or The New York Times), think tank research reports (speculations about overcapacity), economic textbooks’ division of labor theories (assemblers at the bottom of the smile curve), and cheap consumer goods labeled “Made in China” on supermarket shelves.

They share a core characteristic: all are indirect.

Whether it’s the stereotype of China as the “world’s factory” or the grand narrative of the “Thucydides Trap,” all are filtered through multiple layers, packaged into specific frameworks, and then fed to the public as conclusions. For a long time, this system firmly locked Western perceptions of China into stereotypes.

However, in the Daxing factory, this system has failed.

Stepping into the workshop, what hits you is an almost surreal silence. In the key process of the body-in-white, which is 100% automated, the overall automation rate reaches 91%. Over 400 robots work in harmony with more than 400 high-precision cameras, achieving true “lights-out” production. In the die-casting workshop, a steel giant with a locking force of up to 9,100 tons can produce 72 parts in a single casting in just 120 seconds, with errors less than a strand of hair.

Here, on average, a new car rolls off the line every 76 seconds.

When a Silicon Valley venture capitalist or a Washington policymaker stands on the glass corridor and witnesses all this firsthand, they no longer need any think tank report to prove that “Chinese manufacturing is upgrading.” The dry, dull numbers in reports are transformed into the mechanical arms waving before their eyes.

Scrolling news on Twitter or watching a car roll off the line every 76 seconds from the balcony—these two perspectives on Chinese manufacturing create a huge cognitive gap. This gap is the greatest space for perception arbitrage between China and the U.S. The smartest people with top resources are leveraging this information asymmetry to secretly adjust their asset allocations.

Daytime tax hikes, nighttime pilgrimages

In spring 1950, young Japanese engineer Eiichi Toyoda boarded a flight to the United States, heading straight for the Ford Rouge plant in Detroit. At that time, Ford’s daily capacity reached 8,000 vehicles, while Toyoda’s annual output was a mere 40.

That trip to Detroit directly inspired the later Toyota Production System. Soon after, larger-scale actions followed. In 1955, the U.S. and Japanese governments jointly launched the “Productivity Plan,” sending nearly 4,000 Japanese engineers to visit factories in the U.S. It was an organized pilgrimage. The Japanese traveled across the ocean because they were acutely aware of their lagging position and eager to learn.

But now, the direction has reversed.

Western elite groups, with complex feelings, fly to Beijing Daxing. There are no government-organized tours, no national endorsements. Under the backdrop of trade wars, this trip even seems politically incorrect. Yet, they still come spontaneously, privately, and secretly.

As early as 2010, China’s manufacturing value-added surpassed the U.S. for the first time, claiming the top spot globally. By 2024, China’s manufacturing value-added accounted for nearly 30% of the world, roughly equal to the combined total of the U.S., Japan, and Germany. In the new energy vehicle sector, China is showing a crushing advantage: in 2025, Chinese new energy passenger cars held 68.4% of the global market share.

In contrast, the former pilgrimage site Detroit has now fallen into ruins. The decline of American manufacturing is no accident but the bitter fruit of over four decades of excessive financialization.

Since Milton Friedman proposed the “shareholder value maximization” theory in the 1970s, American companies have begun shifting resources away from long-term manufacturing investments to chase short-term financial returns.

Boeing is a stark lesson. After merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, Boeing’s corporate culture shifted from engineer-led to Wall Street-led. Executives obsessed with outsourcing to cut costs and stock buybacks to boost share prices. This not only led to the 737 MAX tragedy but also caused the entire manufacturing system to hollow out.

During the day, supporting tariffs against China in Washington; at night, queuing to visit factories in Daxing. U.S. strategy toward China is based on the premise that China is a threat that must be contained; yet, the private actions of American elites follow a different logic: China is a reality that must be acknowledged.

Policies may temporarily disconnect from reality, but the sense of capital and the evolution of perception will ultimately catch up with the reality.

In early 2025, Spencer Gore, founder of the U.S. sodium-ion battery startup Bedrock Materials, flew to China to visit CATL’s factory. He saw Chinese battery giants using the same production lines and equipment for lithium-ion batteries to produce sodium-ion batteries effortlessly.

Back home, he immediately disbanded his company and refunded the $9 million in funding to investors.

Eiichi Toyoda went to Detroit to learn; today, American elites going to Beijing are here to confirm one thing. Something they have vaguely sensed but need to see with their own eyes to truly accept.

Unintentional Impact

In this wave of visits, Lei Jun’s role appears somewhat subtle.

At the end of 2024, when he decided to open up the factory to the public, his original intention was purely commercial—simply to sell cars. In the heavily barriered, capital-intensive automotive industry, a brand that crossed over from smartphones faces the biggest trust gap. Lei Jun opening the factory was just to dispel doubts and build trust.

But he only opened the door, inadvertently knocking down another invisible wall.

Over the past decade, China has invested heavily in overseas Confucius Institutes and launched national image advertising, trying to enhance soft power through cultural exports. However, these top-down, official-style efforts often trigger defensive reactions in the West, sometimes outright being labeled as “propaganda tools.”

When others realize you’re trying to persuade them, their first response is always suspicion and skepticism.

In contrast, Xiaomi’s factory said nothing. It didn’t try to impose any values or sell any grand narrative. It was just there—quietly and efficiently—producing a car every 76 seconds.

In social psychology, there’s a “contact hypothesis” which suggests that the best way to eliminate prejudice against a group isn’t through preaching but by creating conditions for direct, equal contact.

In the information warfare era, the dominant narrative over the past decade has been that whoever controls the media framework wins the perception war. China has been at a disadvantage in this narrative battle. But Xiaomi’s factory in Daxing shows us that when the pull of reality is strong enough, even the most tightly woven narratives will collapse on their own. You don’t need to fight a narrative war; just open the gates and let others see the truth firsthand.

The highest form of soft power often arises the moment you have no intention of influencing anyone at all.

The Longest Geopolitical Variable

As night falls over Daxing, the factory’s workshops remain brightly lit.

The American children brought by their parents for visits may already be sleeping soundly in the car on the way back to the hotel. They don’t understand tariffs, the Thucydides Trap, or why their parents spent so much effort and money just to show them an assembly line.

But their eyes won’t lie, and they will remember it all.

Geopolitical analysts always focus on aircraft carrier numbers, chip legislation, and trade deficits, but few pay attention to intergenerational perception transfer.

These American children, aged 8 to 15 now, will grow up in twenty years to become Wall Street investors, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Washington policymakers, or ordinary voters. Their first impressions of China won’t be the biased filters of CNN news, nor the fabricated enemies politicians talk about, but the firsthand sensory memories etched through experience.

This perception rooted in personal experience is often the hardest to overturn because it doesn’t rely on third-party endorsements; it depends solely on their own eyes.

Twenty years from now, when they sit at the conference table discussing China, what will be the first image that comes to mind? Not cheap goods, not the noisy global factory. They might recall that quiet workshop, the tireless robotic arms under the lights, or the car that was assembled before their eyes in a flowing, seamless process.

Once this perception seed is planted, it can never be uprooted.

This is a twenty-year-long cognitive reset, more unbreakable than any trade agreement, more irreversible than any diplomatic statement. The eyes of these children are the most unpredictable yet most irreversible variable in America’s future China policy.

The direction of pilgrimage has truly changed.