If there was a single idea running through Dao’s technology and business reporting of China in 2025, it was transition. Not the noisy, slogan-led kind, but quieter shifts that only become obvious once several stories are viewed together. Across AI, platforms, regulation, and consumer business, China spent the year moving from experimentation toward accountability – and discovering what breaks in the process.
When AI stopped assisting and started acting
The most striking example came from artificial intelligence. Much of the global conversation still frames AI as a tool: something that assists, recommends, or accelerates human work. China, by contrast, began shipping products that treated AI as an actor.
The agentic smartphone developed through a partnership involving ByteDance (字节跳动) collapsed everyday phone use into approvals rather than actions, with AI navigating apps end to end like a human. It was an audacious leap – and one that triggered an equally rapid rollback. The technology worked. The governance did not. What Dao captured was not a failed product launch, but the first real-world stress test of what happens when autonomy outruns trust.
From subsidies to mindshare in consumer platforms
On the business side, China’s consumer giants told a parallel story of recalibration. For years, growth was fuelled by subsidies, discounts, and aggressive user acquisition. In 2025, Dao documented a pivot toward something less visible but more durable: mindshare.
Meituan (美团) began emphasising delivery certainty and service guarantees over pure price competition. It’s rivals in Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴) rolled Taobao (淘宝), Ele.me (饿了么) and several other facets of its business into one umbrella platform now called Taobao Flash Sale (淘宝闪购). The signals from China biggest local-life platforms are clear. No longer will the competition be won on slashed prices. Instead, quality of service and all-encompassing app ecosystems are the name of game going forward.
The end of universal playbooks for China in 2025
Another recurring theme was the quiet collapse of one-size-fits-all China strategies for global brands. Dao’s coverage of sportswear, luxury, and lifestyle retail consistently showed companies discovering that China no longer compensates for strategic shortcuts. Flagships became cultural spaces rather than sales floors. Pricing logic tightened. Storytelling grew more local, more restrained, and more precise. The market began demanding fluency instead of ambition.
Regulation moves from permissive to directive – and strategic
Regulation did not simply tighten this year – it became strategic. China’s newest Five-Year Plan signalled a shift away from open-ended experimentation toward managed deployment aligned with national priorities. The focus has moved from whether technologies can scale to where and how they should scale, with clearer links to national security, resilience, and productivity.
Under that framework, technology is no longer treated as an end in itself. It is expected to serve national interests – strengthening self-reliance in critical systems, reducing external dependencies, and reinforcing China’s capacity to withstand geopolitical and supply-chain shocks.
Execution as China’s enduring advantage
Finally, there was China’s distinctive approach to deep tech execution. While many countries remain stuck at pilot scale, Dao tracked how China continued pushing toward industrialisation – from commercially viable humanoid robots to autonomous vehicles.
The lesson was familiar but newly reinforced: China is now both a source of frontier invention and one of the world’s most effective engines for turning those inventions into manufacturable systems, compressing the distance between breakthrough and deployment.
China in 2025: The bigger picture
Taken together, Dao’s 2025 coverage showed China not as a market chasing global trends, but as one increasingly setting them. AI moved from assistance to agency, platforms from subsidies to systems, and regulation from permissive oversight to strategic direction. These were not reactive moves, but signals of a market confident enough to define its own rules.
As China matures, the centre of gravity has shifted. The country is no longer primarily adapting technologies, business models, or consumer strategies pioneered elsewhere. It is generating its own reference points – in platform design, AI deployment, industrial scale-up, and regulatory architecture – and forcing global players to respond. Speed still matters, but discernment now matters more. In 2025, China began behaving less like an emerging market in search of momentum, and more like a mature one deciding what kind of technological and commercial power it wants to project.
