"Made in China" by Fabio Masi, Hotel de Russie, Rome, July 2, 2026
There is a moment, in every genuine threshold experience, when the gaze we believed to be turned elsewhere turns back on us. This is the effect produced by "Made in China," the documentary by Fabio Masi presented yesterday in preview within the intimate setting of the Hotel de Russie, which will air on Saturday, July 11 at 8 p.m. on Rai3. Not a reportage in the traditional sense of the term, but what might be called an instant movie: a montage of interviews, glances, and barely contained enthusiasm, capable of rendering the raw emotion of a group of Westerners suddenly confronted with a future already accomplished elsewhere. Having myself recently returned from a trip to China, I found in this screening something more than a mere document: I recognized in it the same vertigo, the same productive disorientation of thought one feels when the Other ceases to be a theoretical hypothesis and becomes an ORGANIZATION, a visible, functioning, everyday infrastructure.
The Journey as a Philosophical Device
Born from an idea by Giancarlo De Leonardo, president of the Innovation Bridge Foundation, and produced by Growing Production (Corrado Tatangelo and Benedetto Orestini), the film follows a small group of entrepreneurs, bank directors, and artificial intelligence experts along an itinerary that retraces, with an almost ironic understatement, the stages of the Silk Road in the spirit of Marco Polo: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong. The stops at the giants of Chinese innovation — Xiaomi, Alibaba, BYD, Geely — are not mere production locations but genuine stations of a secular pilgrimage, where technology assumes the function once reserved for the sacred: that of revealing, through disorientation, the fragility of our interpretive categories.
De Leonardo, in his statements, insists on a point that would deserve far more than a passing remark: innovation, he says, "is not just a matter of technology, but above all of vision." Read against the light, this is a statement that opens a significant political fissure: if Italy's delay in adopting artificial intelligence — only 33% of companies report having implemented it, 76% of SMEs have neither invested nor plan to invest, and just 7% have launched structured training programs, according to Aon data (Human Capital Trends Study 2026) and the SME Digital Innovation Observatory at the Politecnico di Milano — is not a technical problem but a deficit of collective imagination, then what is truly at stake is not the updating of tools but the very survival of a certain Western way of situating oneself in time.
The Pool Sequence: Biopolitics in Swimwear
Tonino Pinto, who spoke in the debate following the screening, rightly described the film as one of extraordinary topicality; it should be noted that the documentary has a beating heart, a moment in which the direction stops narrating and begins to interrogate: the extract taken from "Human" — the cinematic trilogy evoked in the montage — showing a pool crowded with Chinese bodies, literally pressed against one another among rubber rings and colorful floats. A sequence that functions as a genuine "blob moment" — in the highest and most irreverent sense the term has acquired in the tradition of the Rai program that will host that material (the appointment is set for Saturday, July 11 at 8 p.m. on Rai3). Behind the apparent lightness of the beach scene lies a question that is at once aesthetic and political: what remains of privacy, what remains of individual freedom, when bodily density itself becomes a value, an aesthetic, almost a shared ethic? The Chinese swimming pool, in this sense, is not folklore but a Foucauldian device: a place where control is exercised not through repression but through proximity, not through prohibition but through the absence of distance.
Freedom, Security, and the Totalitarian Temptation
It is precisely here that the documentary, while remaining within the register of travel narrative, crosses into the most urgent political-existential reflection of our time: the relationship — never resolved, always reopened by every new crisis — between freedom and security. In the debate that animated the terrace of the Hotel de Russie after the screening, the trip's participants did not conceal an ambivalence that is itself the film's true subject: admiration for a system capable of orchestrating millions of lives with an efficiency unthinkable in Europe mixes with unease toward something that, not too subtly, resembles a totalitarian regime in its most classic sense — a society that has relinquished the space of dissent for the sake of a functioning order. The proposals that emerged during the discussion, however much framed as convivial provocations — banning influencers from speaking publicly without a university degree, banning layoffs when the replacement is carried out by artificial intelligence — are nothing but Western variants of the same impulse: regulating the unpredictable, protecting through constraint, exchanging negative freedom (the right to be wrong, to be incompetent, to be replaced) for a positive security imposed from above. It is the paradox that Hannah Arendt would have recognized without hesitation: totalitarianism never arises as declared violence, but as a promise of order against the chaos of freedom.
A Title That Bites Its Own Tail
The title deserves a mention of its own, for it is perhaps the most subtly political gesture of the entire operation. "Made in China," a label that for decades in the West signified poor quality, mass production, and low cost, is here inverted in an almost sarcastic key: no longer the mark of imitation but of anticipation, no longer the sign of industrial subordination but of a technological hegemony being built quietly, while Europe still debates regulation. In a geopolitical context marked by the strategic confrontation between the United States and China, by the recent meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, and by an increasingly heated global debate on artificial intelligence, the irony of the title turns into an open question: what will the label "Made in China" mean ten years from now? And, above all, what will the label "Made in Europe" mean over that same span of time?
Conclusion: The Mirror Does Not Lie
"Made in China" does not claim to answer these questions, and it is precisely in this that its intellectual honesty lies. Fabio Masi builds a work that rejects any predetermined thesis, leaving room instead for live testimony, doubt, and the contradictions of its own protagonists — entrepreneurs and bankers who oscillate between enthusiasm and unease, between admiration and alarm. The documentary, in the end, is not about China. It is about us, about our way of looking elsewhere so as not to look within. And if it is true, as the phrase that inspired the project states, that one's first time in China does not change the way one sees the East but changes the way one sees the West, then the real question that lingers in the air of the Roman terrace, between one glass and the next, is whether the West is still willing to look at itself in the mirror without turning its gaze away.
Press Contacts
Innovation Bridge – Comin & Partners
Francesco Tabarrini [email protected] 333 4605835
Teresa Bartoli Press Office 348 793 2811 – [email protected]
