China’s Tech Showcase: Ambition, Innovation, and Unanswered Trade Questions

The Russians – officials, business people, and media – turned out in full force, but the only American presence visible at a gigantic, high-tech trade fair last week in central China was Elon Musk, or rather, his disembodied voice. It boomed from a Tesla video, enthusiastically pitching “humanoid robots.”

The Tesla booth was just one among hundreds at this vibrant gathering of dazzling, and sometimes unusual, technological breakthroughs. The expo featured boxing robots, robots designed to clean toilets, and even emotional support robots for older adults. Also on display were automated police vans, a self-driving yacht, and products from many of China’s over 100 electric vehicle brands, all locked in increasingly fierce competition for market share.

Dominating Tesla’s display at the fourth Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou was its Cybertruck. This tank-like vehicle, however, cannot be sold in China due to regulatory disapproval. While other Tesla models are available, their sales have plummeted amidst overwhelming competition from Chinese brands, which offer superior technology at much lower prices (though only a handful of these brands manage to turn a profit).

The sheer scale of Chinese-made gadgets and gizmos on display covered an area larger than 21 football fields. It served as a powerful demonstration of China’s transformation from a manufacturing hub driven by cheap labor into an economic powerhouse increasingly fueled by innovation and mastery of advanced technologies previously dominated by the United States.

However, at a time of escalating trade tensions and growing international concern over a surge of Chinese exports, the expo also brought forth challenging questions: Who will ultimately purchase all these products? And can the companies producing them genuinely achieve profitability?

Senior Chinese officials and Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Grigorenko, inaugurated the digital expo last Thursday with calls for increased global cooperation. This subtly countered the Trump administration’s erratic attempts to limit China’s access to advanced artificial intelligence chips and hinder its rise as a high-tech superpower.

Wang Hao, the Communist Party boss for Zhejiang Province, where Hangzhou is located, highlighted that the digital economy now contributes over 50 percent of his province’s total output. Zhejiang was once primarily an agricultural region, renowned for its tea and silkworms. China, he added, is committed to “working with all parties to explore the new blue ocean of digital trade and write a new chapter of win-win cooperation.”

For President Trump, however, such cooperation has often been framed as China having “ripped us off and left us for dead,” a sentiment he vocalized in April.

One salesman at the expo, who was promoting urinal-cleaning robots, argued that this perspective misrepresents the shared benefits. He simply asked, “Nobody likes cleaning toilets,” so what is wrong with letting Chinese robots “do the dirty work?”

His company, Hangzhou Star Species Robotics, has primarily focused on the domestic market, selling robots to maintain restrooms in Chinese railway stations and other public venues. However, he expressed aspirations to enter international markets.

Without explicitly naming President Trump, the expo organizers were keen to demonstrate the failure of American attempts to isolate China. They proudly announced in a statement that 11,000 international buyers had registered to attend, a 64 percent increase from the previous year, underscoring “the expo’s expanding global reach.”

A recent tour of Chinese high-tech companies in the Yangtze River Delta, arranged for foreign journalists by the Foreign Ministry, conveyed a consistent message: regardless of the Trump administration’s efforts to impede China’s progress and any domestic economic challenges, China’s advancement in AI, robotics, and other digital industries continues unabated.

“If you face obstacles, you can always find another path around them,” stated Kong Fuan, the Communist Party secretary at the Hongqiao Overseas Development Service Center, a government office in Shanghai dedicated to attracting foreign investment and talent, and helping Chinese companies expand globally.

While the United States is imposing stricter and more costly measures for companies to bring in foreign workers, Mr. Kong emphasized, “We always welcome talent from all corners of the world.”

China is in the process of introducing a new visa category, specifically designed to facilitate travel to China for study or business by graduates of top universities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.

In Hefei, a city west of Shanghai that has transformed from a modest backwater into a booming high-tech center, the AI company iFlyTek stands as a stark rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s policies. Despite being placed on a U.S. blacklist in 2019 by the first Trump administration due to human rights concerns, effectively blocking it from purchasing American products, iFlyTek’s ambitions remained undeterred. The company has since unveiled a wide array of new products.

The company has since relocated to a sprawling, strikingly futuristic new office campus.

Among its newly developed products are a device for grading school exam papers and an AI chatbot capable of answering questions spoken in half a dozen languages, including Chinese, English, and Russian, with responses displayed on a screen. (When asked why Russia invaded Ukraine, the chatbot cited Russian security concerns but also noted that President Vladimir V. Putin had disseminated false propaganda and used the war to divert attention from Russia’s “stagnating economy.”)

Cheng Chen, the general manager of iFlyTek’s consumer business group, responsible for AI translation, explained that the exam grading machine’s purpose was not to replace teachers but to “help them utilize their time more effectively on creative, essential tasks.”

She asserted that the intermittent restrictions on exporting advanced American-made AI chips to China, which she described as “the best for training large language models,” had not harmed the company. She added that the Chinese company Huawei was providing adequate alternatives.

iFlyTek, with state-owned China Mobile as its largest shareholder, has seen its share price more than double since Mr. Trump imposed sanctions. Recent U.S.-China trade frictions have had minimal impact on its market value.

Last week’s reports that China had prohibited its largest technology companies from purchasing from the American company Nvidia, which supplies the most advanced AI chips, further reinforced the notion that China could manage independently.

Ensuring this self-reliance has been a cornerstone of Chinese state policy under Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. In recent years, Mr. Xi has frequently invoked the Chinese phrase “zili gengsheng” — meaning self-reliance — a term popularized by Mao Zedong to promote a disastrous policy of economic isolation that ultimately impoverished the nation.

Mr. Xi’s contemporary vision of self-reliance doesn’t aim to cut China off entirely. Instead, it seeks to guarantee that the Party maintains control over any foreign elements that might challenge national sovereignty. In the realm of high-tech innovation, as the president articulated in an April Politburo meeting, this translates to establishing an “autonomously controllable” ecosystem of AI hardware and software.

There are significant limitations to how much China can achieve independently, a fact underscored by the eagerness for foreign sales exhibited by many of the high-tech companies showcasing their products.

China has accumulated increasingly large trade surpluses, which last year contributed up to half of the country’s economic growth and helped mitigate the impact of a years-long property market downturn.

Since Mr. Trump assumed office this year, China’s trade with the United States has seen a sharp decline, heavily impacted by uncertainty surrounding tariffs. However, its overall trade surplus is projected to surpass last year’s colossal gap of nearly $1 trillion between its imports and exports.

Whether China can truly function without the most advanced American AI chips remains a subject of considerable debate. At the Hangzhou expo, Chen Jiaxin, a marketing manager for Unitree Robotics, enthusiastically discussed her company’s advancements in developing humanoid robots capable of dancing and boxing. Yet, she sidestepped all inquiries regarding the impact of U.S. export restrictions on chips and broader trade frictions, stating, “It is not convenient to answer.”

The company perhaps best positioned to offer a clear answer is DeepSeek, a small Chinese start-up that last year astonished Silicon Valley by launching a new AI system. This system, utilizing Nvidia chips, reportedly matched the capabilities of chatbots developed at far greater expense by industry giants like OpenAI and Google.

DeepSeek maintained a presence at the Hangzhou digital expo, but its booth was left unattended. Perhaps out of caution regarding sensitive questions about whether the release of a new AI model this summer was delayed due to issues with Chinese-made substitute chips, the company merely displayed a poster with its logo and offered no further information.