The Russians — officials, business people and media — turned out in force, but the only American in view at a gigantic, high-tech trade fair last week in central China was Elon Musk, or at least his disembodied voice, booming out from a Tesla video pitching “humanoid robots.”
The Tesla booth was one of hundreds at the jamboree of dazzling and sometimes quirky technological innovations. The expo featured boxing robots, robots that clean toilets, emotional support robots for older adults, automated police vans, a self-driving yacht and many of the more than 100 Chinese electric vehicle brands engaged in increasingly cutthroat competition for market share.
At the center of Tesla’s display at the event, the fourth Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou, was its Cybertruck, a tank-like vehicle that cannot be sold in China because it hasn’t been approved by regulators. Tesla cars are on the market, but their sales have plummeted in the face of the crushing competition from Chinese brands offering better technology and far lower prices (though only a handful make money).
The vast array of Chinese-made gadgets and gizmos on display filled an area bigger than 21 football fields. It showcased China’s success at turning its huge manufacturing sector, once driven almost entirely by cheap labor, into an economic juggernaut increasingly powered by innovation and the mastery of advanced technologies previously dominated by the United States.
But at a time of rising trade tensions, amid alarm in both rich and poor countries over a flood of Chinese exports, the display also raised difficult questions: Who will buy all this stuff? And can the companies that make it turn a profit?
Senior Chinese officials and a deputy prime minister from Russia, Dmitry Grigorenko, opened the digital expo last Thursday with pleas for more global cooperation, taking a veiled swipe at zigzagging efforts by the Trump administration to cut China off from the most advanced artificial intelligence chips and thwart its rise as a high-tech superpower.
Wang Hao, the Communist Party boss for Zhejiang Province, of which Hangzhou is the capital, said the digital economy accounted for more than 50 percent of the total output in his province, once primarily an agrarian region famous for its tea and silkworms. China, he added, wants to “work 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 meant that China “has ripped us off and left us for dead,” as he said in April.
For one salesman at the expo, who was hawking urinal-cleaning robots, that view distorted the benefits to be shared by everyone. “Nobody likes cleaning toilets,” he said, so what is wrong with letting Chinese robots “do the dirty work?”
He said his company, Hangzhou Star Species Robotics, has so far focused on the domestic market, selling robots to clean washrooms in Chinese railway stations and other public spaces. But he hoped to break into the market abroad.
Without mentioning President Trump, expo organizers were eager to show that American efforts to isolate China had failed. They boasted in a statement that 11,000 international buyers had signed up to attend, 64 percent more than last year, “highlighting the expo’s expanding global reach.”
A tour of Chinese high-tech companies in the Yangtze River Delta last week that was organized for foreign journalists by the Foreign Ministry carried the same message: Whatever the Trump administration’s efforts to hold China back and whatever problems its economy may be facing, China’s development of A.I., robotics and other digital industries is racing ahead regardless.
“If you get blocked you can always find another way around,” said Kong Fuan, the Communist Party secretary at the Hongqiao Overseas Development Service Center, a government office in Shanghai working to attract foreign investment and talent and to help Chinese companies “go global.”
While the United States is making it more difficult and expensive for companies to bring in foreign workers, “We always open our hands to talent from all over the world,” Mr. Kong said.
China is introducing a new type of visa that is designed to make it easier for graduates of top universities in science, technology, engineering or mathematics to travel to China to study or do business.
In Hefei, a city west of Shanghai that has been transformed from a shabby backwater into a high-tech hub, iFlyTek, an A.I. company, stands as a powerful rebuke to Mr. Trump’s policies toward China. The company showed off a wide range of new products developed since the first Trump administration in 2019 put it on a U.S. blacklist of 28 Chinese companies over concerns about their role in alleged human rights violations. The move effectively blocked iFlyTek from buying American products, but it did not slow its ambitions.
The company has since moved into a sprawling new office campus that is strikingly futuristic.
Newly developed products include a device for grading school exam papers and an A.I. chatbot that can answer questions spoken into a microphone in one of half a dozen different languages, including Chinese, English and Russian. The answers appear on a screen. (Asked why Russia had invaded Ukraine, the chatbot cited Russian security concerns but also said that President Vladimir V. Putin had promoted untrue propaganda and used the war to divert attention from Russia’s “stagnating economy.”)
Cheng Chen, the general manager of iFlyTek’s consumer business group in charge of A.I. translation, said the aim of the exam machine, which allows teachers to grade papers without reading them, was not to eliminate teachers but to “help them use their time better on more creative, essential things.”
On-again, off-again restrictions on the export of advanced American-made A.I. chips to China, which she said were “the best for training large language models,” had not hurt the company, she insisted, adding that the Chinese company Huawei was providing adequate substitutes.
iFlyTek, which has the state-owned China Mobile as its biggest shareholder, has seen its share price more than double since Mr. Trump imposed sanctions. Recent U.S.-China trade frictions have had little impact on its market value.
Reports last week that China had banned its biggest technology companies from buying from the American company Nvidia, which sells the most advanced A.I. chips, reinforced the message that China could go it alone.
Trying to ensure that it can do that has been a cornerstone of Chinese state policy under Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. Mr. Xi in recent years has regularly called for “self-reliance,” resurrecting a Chinese phrase — “zili gengsheng” — that was used by Mao Zedong to promote a disastrous policy of economic autarky that cut China off from the world and made its people poorer.
Mr. Xi’s version of self-reliance does not aim to isolate China but to ensure that the Party keeps control of anything foreign that could challenge national sovereignty. In the world of high-tech innovation, the president told a Politburo meeting in April, that means the creation of an “autonomously controllable” ecosystem of A.I. hardware and software.
There are severe limits to how far China can go on its own, as evidenced by the hunger for foreign sales displayed by many of the high-tech companies hawking their wares.
China has stacked up ever larger trade surpluses, which last year accounted for up to half of the country’s economic growth and helped blunt the pain of a yearslong property crash.
China’s trade with the United States has fallen sharply since Mr. Trump took office this year, hammered by uncertainty over tariffs. But its overall surplus is on track to exceed even last year’s enormous gap of nearly $1 trillion between what it buys and what it sells.
And whether it can really do without the most advanced American A.I. chips is open to debate. At the Hangzhou expo, Chen Jiaxin, a marketing manager for Unitree Robotics, spoke excitedly about the Chinese company’s breakthroughs in developing humanlike robots that can dance and box. But she avoided all questions about the effect of U.S. export restrictions on chips and general trade frictions. “It is not convenient to answer,” she said.
The company that could perhaps give the clearest answer is DeepSeek, a small Chinese start-up that last year stunned Silicon Valley by unveiling a new A.I. system that, using Nvidia chips, matched the capabilities of chatbots developed at far greater cost by behemoths like OpenAI and Google.
DeepSeek had a stall at the Hangzhou digital expo. But, perhaps wary of answering sensitive questions about whether it delayed the release of a new A.I. model this summer because of problems with Chinese-made substitute chips, it left its booth at the expo unattended. It put up a poster with its logo and provided no other information.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw, on temporary assignment in Shanghai.
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