Since the reform and opening-up was carried out in 1978, a comprehensive and competitive modern industrial system has been set up in China, which plays a vital role in the world. Persisting in reform and opening-up, keeping the social and economic environments stable, building the comprehensive public infrastructure, encouraging the initiative of the local governments, and strengthen the innovation and technology progress contribute a lot to the achievements of manufacturing in China. Meanwhile, there are still some obstacles to restricting the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing from institution, mechanism, and policies in China.

Manufacturing plays a vital role in a country. This article explains the reality of China’s manufacturing industry which is “large but not strong”, refers to the domestic and foreign manufacturing industry evaluation system research experience, defined the connotation and characteristics of manufacturing power, established a comprehensive evaluation system which included 4 first-class indexes and 18 secondary-class indexes, and take this as the foundation. This article has carried on the preliminary analysis between China and several other countries.

By comparing and referring the experiences how the four major core elements (first-class indexes) improved manufacturing industry in industrial developed countries. This article analyzed the gap between China and other countries, explored the common regularities how to realize manufacturing power, and estimated the speed and the target to be a strong country in manufacturing industry. This article proposed policy suggestions based on the analysis of 18 secondary-class indexes.

Based on the Hallak Product Quality model, we construct an empirical product quality model adopting unit value, distance between countries, income per capita. This research measures Chinese, Indian and Brazilian manufacturing quality of HS6 products that export to the U.S., from 2003 to 2013. And we put forward policy recommendations to improve China’s product quality upgrading ability in the international market.

This article mainly discussed the historical development tendency of 18 secondary-indexes of manufacturing power, and summarized the characteristics of them in different periods in the early, middle, late industrialized and post-industrial countries.

The fusion of the manufacturing industry, next-generation Internet, and information technologies is catalyzing the development of industrial Internet. The importance of developing the industry Internet platform (IIP) is recognized not only by leading international manufacturers, but also by people involved in framing China's manufacturing strategies. In this paper, the development trends of IIP are elaborated and the challenges in building the client-ecosphere, developer-ecosphere, as well as the data-ecosphere of IIP are analyzed. Furthermore, the technical challenges of IIP in modeling and analyzing industry big data system and industry data are discussed in depth.

State-of-the-art technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing (CC), big data analytics (BDA), and artificial intelligence (AI) have greatly stimulated the development of smart manufacturing. An important prerequisite for smart manufacturing is cyber–physical integration, which is increasingly being embraced by manufacturers. As the preferred means of such integration, cyber–physical systems (CPS) and digital twins (DTs) have gained extensive attention from researchers and practitioners in industry. With feedback loops in which physical processes affect cyber parts and vice versa, CPS and DTs can endow manufacturing systems with greater efficiency, resilience, and intelligence. CPS and DTs share the same essential concepts of an intensive cyber–physical connection, real-time interaction, organization integration, and in-depth collaboration. However, CPS and DTs are not identical from many perspectives, including their origin, development, engineering practices, cyber–physical mapping, and core elements. In order to highlight the differences and correlation between them, this paper reviews and analyzes CPS and DTs from multiple perspectives.