Chinese city governments behave like venture capital partnerships: they pick companies, back them with equity, cash and free flats, then wait for the taxes to come back. The property slump and the DeepSeek moments are the same balance sheet seen from opposite ends.
The Economist sent a reporter to Shantou to cover a hit film. What came back was an autopsy. They are wrong about the patient. The piece (”Bottom of the class”, July 23) declares Shantou the special economic zone that failed, the odd one out among four. GDP per person of 54,000 yuan. Growth of 0.1% … Read more
Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin presenting Kimi Chat’s long-context model capabilities. After DeepSeek, another Chinese model has rattled the United States. On July 22, four things happened in a single day. Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot AI on X of “large-scale distillation” of American … Read more
China’s manufacturing heartland released its nine-month economic data on 26 October, and one line in it deserves more attention than the headline growth figure. Guangdong industrial robot output rose 34.2 per cent in the first three quarters of 2026. Illustration: The Robot Belt (Source: Shenzhen News) Guangdong’s GDP reached RMB 11.109 trillion in the first … Read more
Most Chinese robotics money is chasing legs, arms and payload. A company in Kunshan is chasing something smaller and, on the evidence of its investor list, more investable: the monitor on your desk. CyboPal ONE pairs a 27-inch display with a six-axis arm that turns toward the user. Illustration: The Robot Belt (Source: OFweek) CyboPal, … Read more
For two years the Chinese embodied intelligence pitch has been simple: the factory line is expensive, people are expensive, and a machine that replaces both pays for itself. On 23 October, the State Council General Office narrowed that pitch. Beijing has directed robot deployment toward hazardous and labour-shortage roles first. Illustration: The Robot Belt (Source: … Read more
At GTC Berlin, Nvidia and Agile Robots jointly launched Agile ONE SN, a humanoid built for research rather than for a factory floor. The significance is not the machine. It is who is standing next to it. Nvidia and Agile Robots launched Agile ONE SN at GTC Berlin, shipping with Isaac GR00T preinstalled (Source: Gasgoo) … Read more
Embodied intelligence has no shortage of technical routes. It has a shortage of commercial ones, and investors have started paying for the difference. INFIFORCE keeps several body forms as validation platforms for its embodied brain (Source: Gasgoo) Zhejiang Venture Capital Group has completed an investment of close to RMB 100 million in INFIFORCE, a Hangzhou … Read more
The humanoid supply chain has a hierarchy of attention that does not match its hierarchy of difficulty. Actuators and reducers get the conferences. Bearings get the purchase orders. Ultra-micro bearings under 9 millimetres in outer diameter are the hidden constraint in dexterous hands. Illustration: The Robot Belt (Source: OFweek) On a site in Wujiang District, … Read more
In October, the China Marine Economy Expo opened in Shenzhen with hull-cleaning robots, river-cleaning craft, seabed cable machines and deep-sea survey vehicles on the floor. Outside the hall, the money had already gone in. Work-class ROVs are replacing saturation diving on hull inspection and cleaning. Illustration: The Robot Belt (Source: OFweek) Seawit closed an A … Read more
The most expensive input in Chinese robotics this year is not compute, not reducers and not rare earth magnets. It is people, and the market has started pricing them like scarce components. Campus recruiting is now a bidding war for embodied AI graduates in China (Source: OFweek) In April 2026, UBTech, the Hong Kong-listed humanoid … Read more
China’s richest people are usually easy to explain. They own listed shares whose value is set every day by strangers. Liang Wenfeng’s fortune is different. It rests on a company that has no public shareholders, no disclosed revenue and no product for retail customers to buy. DeepSeek is valued near USD 75 billion before any … Read more
For two years the Chinese humanoid trade ran on paper. Terms sheets set the price, the next round ratified it, and nobody had to test whether anyone else would pay it. In October, for the first time, a seller tried to find out. Chinese humanoid valuations are being repriced in the secondary market. Illustration: The … Read more