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Long before “Made in China” became shorthand for mass production, China occupied a different place in the Western imagination. In the 1600s, it was not a factory but a fantasy—a symbol of refinement, luxury, and distant sophistication. Porcelain, silk, and tea were more than commodities; they were coordinates of desire. China, often standing in for Asia as a whole, represented what the West lacked and longed to possess. The appetite was for the exotic, the rare, the exquisite.
Today, that structure persists, though the terms have changed. China is no longer a symbol of rare luxury but of scale and speed. What was once tea and porcelain is now lithium and cloud computing. Desire remains, but it is now driven by efficiency, abundance, and extraction. China—and by extension, Asia—remains both essential and suspect: foundational to American identity, yet consistently cast as the foreign other, to be consumed and resisted in equal measure. At the time of writing, this fraught dyna…
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Long before “Made in China” became shorthand for mass production, China occupied a different place in the Western imagination. In the 1600s, it was not a factory but a fantasy—a symbol of refinement, luxury, and distant sophistication. Porcelain, silk, and tea were more than commodities; they were coordinates of desire. China, often standing in for Asia as a whole, represented what the West lacked and longed to possess. The appetite was for the exotic, the rare, the exquisite.
Today, that structure persists, though the terms have changed. China is no longer a symbol of rare luxury but of scale and speed. What was once tea and porcelain is now lithium and cloud computing. Desire remains, but it is now driven by efficiency, abundance, and extraction. China—and by extension, Asia—remains both essential and suspect: foundational to American identity, yet consistently cast as the foreign other, to be consumed and resisted in equal measure. At the time of writing, this fraught dyna…
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