The next Chinese luxury brand might already be 1,000 years old

For much of the past decade, China’s most-watched brand stories have been about the new: EV makers, beauty upstarts, reinvented tea chains and a new generation of designers. Now the government is pointing somewhere else. On September 7, six ministries led by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the first national-level industrial policy for China's historically established industries, covering silk, tea, porcelain, traditional medicine, brewing, arts and crafts, and the four treasures of the study. MIIT vice-minister Xie Yuansheng put the sector at roughly 8 trillion RMB ($1.19 trillion) in annual revenue across some 25,000 above-scale enterprises, on figures the ministry described as incomplete. By 2028 the policy aims to cultivate 50 leading companies at 10 billion RMB ($1.49 billion) scale, shape 100 Chinese consumer products of national standing, and build several specialized industry clusters at 100 billion RMB ($14.9 billion) scale. Jingdezhen had already been recognized. On July 27, at the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee in Busan, UNESCO inscribed The Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites — five component parts across 1,979 hectares, representing a porcelain production system that ran from the 10th to the 19th century. Instinct says file this under heritage protection. But there is a larger commercial possibility here: luxury brands whose authority is rooted in China's own craft and history. How far can China take craft traditions that are centuries old and turn them into the foundation for modern luxury brands? European luxury is a useful comparison, if an imperfect one. The houses that made heritage valuable did not do it on age alone. Hermès still designs from its equestrian roots; Cartier returns to its archive without simply reproducing it. History earns its keep because it is still doing work in the present. China has that depth too. Longjing, the country’s best-known green tea, carries centuries of cultivation knowledge and its own drinking ritual. Yixing, the Jiangsu city famous for its purple-clay teapots, has built a whole language around clay. Jingdezhen has kilns, workshops, materials and makers, along with a history of absorbing foreign techniques and producing blue-and-white ware that European workshops spent centuries trying to copy. What is striking is how much of that value still sits outside the brand. Jingdezhen is famous; many individual workshops and makers are not. Longjing carries enormous cultural authority, yet distinctions between place, harvest, producer and method can be difficult for a newcomer to read. That is where branding can do more than add a name or a logo. The craft, maker, place and method can become the architecture of the brand itself. A Jingdezhen ceramicist should be more than uncredited labor behind “Chinese porcelain.” A Longjing grower should be able to explain why this year's harvest deserves more attention than the one next door. There is also a livelihood question inside the preservation one. You can write a technique down. That does not mean anyone will still be doing it in 20 years. Timing matters here, too. Decent images and competent design have become close to free in the past three years, and the supply is still rising. Abundance of that kind does not lower value evenly across a category. It concentrates value in whatever cannot be produced on demand. Skill of that kind resists the shortcut. A glaze that behaves predictably at temperature, or a wire-inlay line that holds its shape, cannot be generated, because the knowledge sits in a pair of hands rather than in a file. It takes years of repetition to acquire and it cannot be compressed. So the scarce ingredient may be changing. For a long time, scarcity in luxury meant the material: the hide, the stone, the vintage. As everything reproducible becomes abundant, scarcity moves toward the time inside the object, and time is the one input that does not scale. If that holds, it is a better argument for Chinese craft than any heritage claim. The value would sit in how hard the work is to do, which does not depend on the age of the tradition at all. Some of the foundations of China's next luxury brands may already be sitting in a kiln in Jiangxi. What if the strongest form of localization for a global house is letting Chinese creative work leave China entirely and shape the house elsewhere? Relevance in China has long meant global houses becoming more fluent in Chinese culture on Chinese soil. The work has become considerably more sophisticated. Chinese artists and techniques now appear in collaborations that go well beyond a motif added to a bag. Take Loewe’s Year of the Snake capsule, released in late 2024 for Chinese New Year. The house worked with Xiong Songtao (熊松涛), third-generation inheritor of the Beijing enamel house Xiong's Enamel (熊氏珐琅). Cloisonné work proper appears on a Nest bag and on a set of pendants; the technique then fed the wider capsule, with cloisonné-inspired motifs carried onto pieces including the Puzzle and the Pebble Bucket. Distribution reached past the mainland — Loewe stocked the capsule in Hong Kong and Singapore. The reach was wider than China; the cultural frame was still Chinese New Year. Which makes the interesting boundary one of context rather than distribution. Chinese craft can travel. The question is whether it can become part of a house's creative language beyond the moments when China is explicitly the theme. In 2014, a decade before that capsule, Louis XIII began Heritage Awakening (再造100年), a non-profit project my firm co-created with the house and stayed with from concept through execution for around three years. Chinese craftspeople worked alongside contemporary artists under the brand's Think a Century Ahead philosophy. The premise was that traditional knowledge could generate new work, which is a different proposition from preserving it. Today that thinking feels familiar. Global houses have become considerably more sophisticated in how they work with Chinese artists and crafts. Missing still is the next step: letting Chinese craft and creativity enter the global language of the house without needing China to be the context. Perhaps the most powerful way for a global house to become more relevant in China is to stop treating Chinese culture as something that only matters there. When Chinese consumers see their culture given a place in the brand's global world, what they are being offered is recognition rather than a campaign built for them. A collaboration built around Lunar New Year says: we understand the cultural moment. Letting the same creative contribution shape the house outside the calendar says something more ambitious: we believe it belongs here. The clearest proof that a house values Chinese culture may lie less in what it does with it in Shanghai than in what it is willing to do with it in Paris. China State of Play is a strategic intelligence program from Jing Daily and Other Logic Partners. Marc-Olivier Arnold is co-founder of Other Logic Partners, where he advises CEOs and founders of premium brands on China and Asia, and Chinese brands on expanding internationally. He has worked between Europe and Asia for more than 20 years.

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The next Chinese luxury brand might already be 1,000 years old