Lilian Chen, 2026 SCCEI Summer Study Program Participant

Lilian Chen, Computer Science

Before SCCEI had started, I told myself I was going to come back with a clear-eyed, holistic understanding of China's economy, of which I had an admittedly underdeveloped understanding of in the first place. Two weeks and a dozen site visits later, it turns out that was the wrong goal from the start. In the span of twelve days, we watched a forklift assembly line just outside Shanghai, waded through the crowded park on the Dragon Boat Festival, spoke of the future with kids at the migrant worker school, stood in front of Bronze Age relics at Sanxingdui, and interacted with humanoid robots themselves in Beijing. And while I cannot find a necessarily single thread that ties these various site visits into one clean narrative about the Chinese economy, what I left with instead was more piecewise – a set of sharp, specific understandings from very different vantage points, each one true and none complete on its own! I found that turned out to be the more useful education that I can actually build upon.

Though, if there was a throughline at all, it showed up not in any argument our hosts made but perhaps in something more physical. At the Shuanghuan plant and again at the New Hope Group agribusiness site, I remember seeing a single dashboard showing the entire production process in real time - every line, every machine, every bottleneck, quantified and color-coded on one screen. I'd read about "efficiency" and "scale" in case studies before this trip, but there's a difference between reading the word and standing looking at its personification on a screen. Whether we were in a gear manufacturer feeding into the humanoid robotics supply chain or an agricultural conglomerate that started as a smaller farm, the same instinct was built into the walls of these factories: measure, watch, optimize. Efficiency is king!

To talk more about tech since that was the majority of what I focused on during the trip, the Ant Group visit was the one that reframed things most for me. I'd expected a payments company and found something closer to a full-stack tech ecosystem: an in-house AI VLM model team, AR glasses prototypes, a payments infrastructure. It wasn't simply "China's Venmo." Structurally, it looked a lot like the vertically integrated model-plus-hardware-plus-consumer-product companies. Seeing that in person, and then later sitting in on the GalBot robotics demo in Beijing, made the GPU-and-model story that dominates US-China tech coverage feel less like two isolated systems racing each other and more like two ecosystems solving overlapping problems, often in parallel, and occasionally without knowing it.

That's the piece I think I’m taking most with me looking towards the future. Before this trip, I read papers out of Chinese AI labs the way I read most technical papers - as artifacts, disconnected from any sense of the people or institutions producing them. I want to look at whether there's room for a real collaboration, especially in robotics, where the manufacturing expertise I saw on those factory floors and the model work happening in Beijing seem to be circling the same problems from different angles.

What I got from this trip, in summation, is a handful of very specific rooms, people, and open threads I actually want to follow up on, which is perhaps a far better foundation for the next years of research and innovation than any single narrative about China would have been.