How Chinese brands evolved from followers to front-runners

Editor's note: Wang Xiaoyi is a professor of marketing in Neuromanagement Lab, Zhejiang University. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

May 10, 2026 marks the tenth China Brand Day. Ten years is a short span in the history of global commerce. It took Coca-Cola a century to become Coca-Cola. Mercedes-Benz took even longer. Yet in this single decade, Chinese companies have come further than most observers, myself included, would have predicted.

I have spent nearly 20 years researching Chinese brands and consumer behavior, from tracking the early international moves of domestic appliance makers to spending a great deal of time in recent years walking through the industrial belts of Yiwu, Dongguan, and Shenzhen. I have watched this road being built, one stretch at a time.

The question is: how did Chinese brands rise from followers to front-runners, and what does it mean for the rest of the world?

The recent trade figures give a sense of the scale. In April, China's exports rose 9.8 percent year-on-year. Specifically, integrated circuit exports surged 100.1 percent, while car exports climbed 44 percent. The country's first-quarter foreign trade reached 11.84 trillion yuan, reaching a new high, according to Chinese customs authorities.

The composition of those exports matters more than the size. A decade ago, the typical Chinese export was a T-shirt, a toy, or an appliance bought on price. By contrast, today it is increasingly a battery, a chip, a piece of capital equipment, or a vehicle that competes on engineering. That shift, more than any single number, is what the story is really about.

Chinese brands: From followers to front-runners

For a long time, "Made in China" meant cheap and functional. Chinese firms occupied the low-margin end of the supply chain while foreign brands captured loyalty and pricing power.

It's no longer that way anymore, as international brand rankings suggest. Brand Finance's 2026 Global 500 includes 68 Chinese brands, nearly double the number a decade ago and second only to the United States. On Kantar's BrandZ list, Tencent, Alibaba, and Moutai have become familiar names near the top. My research group has run consumer brand perception surveys in China for years, and we find that the generational shift is striking. Consumers born in the 1990s and 2000s no longer treat "foreign" and "premium" as synonyms. Their willingness to pay for domestic brands is the highest we have measured in two decades, and it's grounded in real product improvement rather than mere sentiment.

The pattern is visible across industries, and worth a close watch. China's vehicle exports grew from 891,000 units in 2017 to over seven million in 2025, as data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers shows, making it the world's largest auto exporter and overtaking Japan in the process. BYD sold more than a million cars overseas last year. Haier has been the world's top-selling major appliance brand for sixteen years running, and now serves more than a billion households. DJI continues to lead the global consumer drone market, with its products used by professional photographers, filmmakers, and emergency response teams in dozens of countries. China's share in all manufacturing stages of solar panels exceeds 80%, according to the International Energy Agency, which means that the global energy transition is, in a real sense, partly a Chinese supply chain story.

What is happening beyond flagship Chinese companies is equally telling. The globalization of Chinese brands is not only the story of a few dozen megabrands. It is also the story of millions of small firms quietly reshaping how goods move around the world. On a recent visit to the Yiwu small commodities market, a place I have been visiting on and off for over a decade, I found I could barely recognize it. The old model was simple: foreign buyers walked the aisles, picked products, and placed orders. Today many stall owners run their own TikTok accounts, talking to a smartphone camera in English about what they make, with orders coming in straight from livestreams. One woman, a middle-aged seller of Christmas decorations, told me her largest customers are now in the Middle East and Africa, places she had never imagined doing business with. That kind of energy in the market is hard to capture in any report or dataset.

Why has all this happened?

A few reasons stand out, and none of them is the conspiracy theory sometimes implied in the Western press. China's domestic market of 1.4 billion consumers is both a vast and a brutally competitive testing ground. Survive here and you are likely to do a good job everywhere. China is the only economy that spans all UN-defined industrial categories, which gives its supply chains remarkable resilience and depth. China's R&D spending, now well above 2 percent of GDP in 2025, has narrowed technology gaps that once looked permanent. Digital infrastructure, from mobile payments to logistics platforms, has lowered the cost of reaching global consumers for firms that would have been invisible a generation ago. And a generation of entrepreneurs has grown up assuming, correctly or otherwise, that they should be playing on a global field rather than a domestic one.

Rise of Chinese brands benefits global consumers

It is worth noting that the rise of Chinese brands is not a zero-sum story, and global consumers will benefit from it in the long run. European drivers benefit from more affordable electric cars. Households across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America can now afford appliances and electronics that would have been out of reach a generation ago. Solar panels manufactured in Anhui and Jiangsu are helping countries in multiple continents meet their climate commitments.

The rise of Chinese brands does not mean the old players are finished. But it does mean that the assumption of permanent leadership in any particular industry, by any particular nation, is no longer safe. It may be uncomfortable for some, but it is how progress has always worked.

Future of Chinese brands: Potential and challenges

The path Chinese brands have taken for their rise can be broken into three layers. The first layer is manufacturing capability, which Chinese firms have largely mastered. The second is the value chain, where they are now competing for design authority, pricing power, and brand equity, with mixed but improving results. The third and hardest is what might be called the influence layer: the ability to shape categories, set standards, and contribute ideas that others choose to adopt.

The next decade will test whether Chinese brands can move from being recognized to being trusted, from selling products to shaping categories, from succeeding in markets to genuinely contributing to them, which takes innovation, cultural fluency, transparency about problems when they arise, and a willingness to be judged by the same standards that apply to any global brand. It is, in the end, what a global brand is.

Difficulties ahead deserve honest treatment from Chinese brands. Trade tensions and tariffs in the United States and Europe are making market access harder and more expensive, and there is little reason to expect that to ease soon. 

Consumer perceptions in some markets still lag behind product reality, particularly at the premium end, where decades of brand-building by global firms cannot be replicated quickly. 

Real localization, the kind that involves understanding local cultures and hiring local talent rather than parachuting in expatriate managers, Chinese companies are still learning. 

Ten years ago, the question was whether Chinese companies could build brands that would capture the world's attention. The honest answer today is that many of them have. 

The more interesting question now is what kind of global citizens those brands will choose to be, and whether the world will choose to meet them halfway. 

Both halves of that question still have time to answer themselves. The front-runner's task, in any race worth running, is not to celebrate having caught up but to keep going, and to justify the position going forward.