The Xiaomi electric vehicle factory in Beijing's Daxing district has become the new Jerusalem for the American elite

Article | Sleepy.md

Starting from 2025, visiting the Xiaomi car factory in Beijing's Daxing district has become one of the top activities for American elite families to bring their children to China. Every Saturday afternoon, at the factory gate, you can always see American parents speaking English with their children, waiting in line to enter the production line of this Chinese car.

The spots for visits here are in high demand. The number of sign-ups for a single event can easily reach 4600 people, but only 20 groups of visitors can go in, with a success rate of 0.4%, comparable to Ivy League admission.

According to publicly available data from the Beijing municipal government, in just the first 6 months of 2025, the factory had received a total of 93,000 visits; by the end of 2025, this number had soared to 130,000. Visitors come from more than 70 countries and regions, including dignitaries, diplomats, multinational corporate executives, Silicon Valley investors, European venture capitalists, as well as groups of American elite families.

What exactly has turned a car production line into a popular attraction?

Paradigm Shift

For the past few decades, the Western world's perception of China has always been built on a traditional cognitive infrastructure.

This infrastructure includes the media's reporting framework (CNN or The New York Times's filter), think tank research reports (deductions on overcapacity), the division of labor theory in economics textbooks (assemblers at the bottom of the smile curve), and the cheap consumer goods labeled "Made in China" on supermarket shelves.

They all share a common core: they are all indirect.

Whether it's the stereotypical image of the "world's factory" or the grand narrative of the "Thucydides Trap," they have all been filtered through layers, packaged into specific frameworks, and then fed to the public as conclusions. For a long time, this system has firmly locked Western impressions of China into stereotypes.

However, in this factory in Daxing, it failed.

Stepping into the workshop, what greets you is an incredibly unreal silence. In the body shop where key processes are 100% automated, with a comprehensive automation rate of up to 91%, more than 400 robots and over 400 high-precision cameras work seamlessly together, achieving true lights-out production. In the press shop, a steel behemoth with a locking force of up to 9100 tons can mold 72 parts into one in just 120 seconds, with an error margin of less than a single strand of hair.

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

When a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, or a Washington policymaker, stands on a glass walkway and witnesses all of this with their own eyes, they no longer need any think tank report to prove to them that "China's manufacturing is upgrading." The dry and withered numbers in the report have all turned into the robotic arms waving before them.

Refreshing the news on Twitter and standing on the walkway to see a car roll off the line every 76 seconds will lead to a significant gap in perceptions of China's manufacturing. This disparity is the largest cognitive arbitrage opportunity between China and the United States today. The smart individuals with top resources are leveraging this information asymmetry to secretly adjust their asset allocations.

Taxing During the Day, Pilgrimage at Night

In the spring of 1950, young Japanese engineer Eiji Toyoda boarded a flight to the United States, heading straight to the Ford Rouge Factory in Detroit. At that time, the Ford factory had a daily production capacity of up to 8,000 vehicles, while Toyota's annual output was a meager 40 vehicles.

It was this trip to Detroit that directly gave birth to Toyota's future production methods. Subsequently, even larger-scale actions followed. In 1955, the governments of the United States and Japan jointly launched the "Productivity Program," sending nearly 4,000 Japanese engineers to the United States to visit factories. It was an organized pilgrimage. The Japanese traveled across the ocean because they knew well of their lagging behind and the urgent need to learn.

But now, the direction has reversed.

Western elites, harboring complex emotions, fly to Beijing Daxing. There is no government organization, no national endorsement, and against the backdrop of a tariff war, this trip even seems quite politically incorrect. But they still come here spontaneously, privately, and stealthily.

As early as 2010, the value added by China's manufacturing industry surpassed that of the United States for the first time, ranking first globally. By 2024, the proportion of China's manufacturing value added in the world had approached 30%, equivalent to the sum of the United States, Japan, and Germany. In the field of new energy vehicles, China has shown a crushing dominance, with China's share of global new energy passenger vehicles reaching 68.4% in 2025.

On the other hand, the once pilgrimage site of Detroit has now become a desolate industrial relic. The decline of the U.S. manufacturing industry is by no means accidental but rather the bitter fruit of a forty-year period of financialization.

Since Milton Friedman put forward the theory of "shareholder value maximization" in the 1970s, U.S. companies have shifted resources from long-term manufacturing investments to aggressively pursuing short-term financial returns.

The Boeing Company is a bloody lesson. Since merging with McDonnell in 1997, Boeing's corporate culture has completely transitioned from being engineer-led to Wall Street-led. Executives were obsessed with cost-cutting through outsourcing, boosting stock prices through buybacks, which not only resulted in the tragedy of the 737 MAX but also led to the complete hollowing out of the entire manufacturing system.

Supporting tariff hikes on China during the day in Washington, then queuing up to visit a factory in Beijing's Daxing district at night. The U.S.' China strategy is based on the premise that China is a threat that must be contained, but the private actions of American elites follow a different logic: China is a reality that must be acknowledged.

Policy may be temporarily decoupled from reality, but the senses of capital and the evolution of cognition will eventually catch up with reality.

In early 2025, Spencer Gore, the founder of the U.S. sodium-ion battery startup Bedrock Materials, flew to China and visited Contemporary Amperex Technology's (CATL) factory. He saw that the Chinese battery giant was using the same production line and equipment used to make lithium-ion batteries to effortlessly produce sodium-ion batteries.

Upon returning home, he promptly dissolved the company and returned the $9 million in funding to investors.

When Toyota's Eiji Toyoda went to Detroit, it was for learning; but today's American elites come to Beijing to confirm one thing. Something they have vaguely sensed but need to see with their own eyes to truly let go of.

Serendipity

In the midst of this trend of factory visits, Lei Jun's role seems somewhat subtle.

By the end of 2024, when he decided to open up the factory to the outside world, his original intention was extremely pure and purely commercial, simply to sell cars. In an industry with high barriers to entry like the automobile industry, the most difficult gap to bridge for a brand that has crossed over from mobile phones is precisely the trust gap of consumers. Lei Jun opened the factory doors only to dispel doubts and build trust.

However, while he only intended to open this door, he unintentionally knocked down another invisible barrier.

Over the past decade, China has invested heavily in building Confucius Institutes overseas, disseminating national image advertisements, attempting to enhance soft power through cultural exports. However, such top-down, heavily official moves often easily trigger a defensive psychological backlash in the West and are even directly categorized as "propaganda tools."

When others perceive that you are trying to persuade them, their first reaction is always caution and skepticism.

In contrast, the Xiaomi factory said nothing. It didn't try to instill any values, nor did it sell any grand narrative. It was just there, quietly and efficiently, churning out a car every 76 seconds.

In social psychology, there is a theory called "intergroup contact theory," which essentially suggests that the best way to reduce prejudice against a group is not to preach to them about lofty principles but to create conditions for direct, equal contact.

In the era of information warfare, the prevailing narrative of the past decade has been that whoever controls the media narrative wins the battle of perception. China has consistently been at a disadvantage in this narrative war. However, the Xiaomi factory in Daxing tells us that when the gravitational pull of reality is strong enough, even the tightest narrative will automatically collapse. You don't need to go to great lengths to win a narrative war; you just need to open the doors and let the other side face reality head-on.

The most sophisticated soft power often arises at the moment when you never intended to influence anyone.

The Longest-Term Geopolitical Variable

As darkness falls over Daxing, the factory floor remains brightly lit.

Those American children brought by their parents to visit may already be fast asleep in the carriages heading back to their hotels. They may not yet understand what a tariff war is, grasp the concept of the "Thucydides Trap," or comprehend why their parents would expend such high costs and energy just to show them an industrial assembly line.

But their eyes will not lie, and they will remember it all.

Geopolitical analysts are always focused on aircraft carrier numbers, chip acts, and trade imbalances, but few pay attention to intergenerational cognitive transmission.

These American children, now only 8 to 15 years old, will grow up twenty years later to be Wall Street investors, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Washington decision-makers, or just ordinary voters. Their first impression of China will no longer be the biased filter on CNN news or the imaginary enemy concocted by politicians but a firsthand sensory memory etched by experience.

This kind of experiential-based cognition is often the most difficult to overturn because it does not need to rely on the endorsement of any third-party information source; it relies solely on their own eyes.

Twenty years from now, when they discuss China at the meeting table, what will be the first image that comes to their minds? Not cheap trinkets, not the bustling world's factory. They might recall that tranquil workshop, the tireless robotic arms under the lights, the car taking shape before their eyes in a seamless assembly.

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

It is a cognitive reset spanning two decades, far more unshakable than any trade deal, more difficult to reverse than any diplomatic statement. The eyes of these children are the most unpredictable yet irreversible variable in America's China policy twenty years later.

The direction of pilgrimage has truly changed.