To catch a glimpse of China's industrial heft, visit Changxing Island in the country's north-east.
There, jutting into the Bohai Sea, is one piece of the machine:
a specialised petrochemical plant that opened in 2012 and has grown relentlessly ever since.
It represents, in condensed form, the powerful mixture that has fuelled China's dominance of global manufacturing:
policy directives, state support, local incentives and restless entrepreneurs.
For the rest of the world it is also a cautionary tale.
Hope springs eternal that China might rein in its excess capacity,
perhaps as a result of its "anti-involution" campaign,
the government's latest attempt to curb cut-throat competition among domestic producers.
But Changxing Island shows it is more realistic to expect another path—namely,
that other countries will find it ever harder to displace China in global supply chains.
This story could be told about almost any kind of factory or locale in China,
so sprawling is the country's manufacturing base.
Changxing Island, however, brings clarity to the analysis as a small place
that has gone from basically nothing to become an unheralded linchpin of global industry in little more than a decade.
Until the early 2000s Changxing was mostly farmland and fishing villages, administered by the nearby city of Dalian.
But it had a big selling point as China's only underused deepwater shoreline.
State planners wanted to kick-start it,
so they designated it as a special development zone focused on chemicals, promising a variety of benefits,
from streamlined approvals to subsidies, for companies that invested there.