The Russian officials, business people and media came into force, but the only American who was at a gigantic high-tech trade fair in Central China last week, was Elon Musk or at least his physical voice, who rose from a Tesla video pitching “Humanoid robot”.
The Tesla stand was one of hundreds in the jamboree of the dazzling and sometimes quirky technological innovations. On the Expo, boxing robots, robots, the toilets, emotional support for older adults, automated police cars, a self-driving yacht and many of the more than 100 Chinese electric vehicles were contained with increasing Cutthroat competition for market share.
At the center of Tesla's presentation at the event, the fourth Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou was his cybertruck, a tangible vehicle that cannot be sold in China because it was not approved by the supervisory authorities. Tesla cars are on the market, but their sales have dropped in view of the crushed competition from Chinese brands that offer better technology and far lower prices (although only a handful of money earns).
The large selection of devices produced by Chinia and Gizmos exhibited an area that is larger than 21 soccer fields. It showed China's success to transform its huge, manufacturing business, which was once almost exclusively driven by cheap workers, into an economic juggernach that is increasingly operated by innovation and the control of advanced technologies that were previously dominated by the United States.
But at a time increasing trade voltages, the display in the middle of alarm in rich and poor countries also asked difficult questions about a flood of Chinese exports: Who will buy all of these things? And can the companies that make profit?
High -ranking Chinese officials and a deputy prime minister from Russia, Dmitry Grigorenko, opened the digital Expo with inquiries about more global cooperation last Thursday. They took a veiled blow on the zigzag efforts of the Trump government to cut China from the most advanced artificial intelligence chips and thwart their increase as a high-tech superpower.
Wang Hao, the head of the Communist Party in the province of Zhejiang, whose capital is Hangzhou, said that the digital economy is more than 50 percent of the total performance in its province, primarily an agricultural region famous for its tea and silk rooms. China, he added, “would like to work with all parties to explore the new blue ocean of digital trade and to write a new chapter of Win-Win cooperation”.
For President Trump, however, such a collaboration led China “roasted us and left us for the dead”, as he said in April.
For a seller at Expo, the urinal cleaning robot Hawking, the view distorted the advantages that should be shared by everyone. “Nobody likes to clean toilets,” he said. So what is wrong to allow Chinese robots. “Do the dirty work?”
He said his company, Hangzhou Star Species Robotics, has so far concentrated on the domestic market and sold robots to cleaning washrooms in Chinese train stations and other public spaces. But he hoped to penetrate the market abroad.
Without mentioning President Trump, the Expo organizers wanted to prove that the American efforts of isolating China had failed. They praised in a statement that 11,000 international buyers had registered for participation, 64 percent more than in the previous year and “highlight the growing global reach of Expo”.
A tour of Chinese high-tech companies in the Jangtse Delta last week, which was organized by the Foreign Ministry for Foreign Journalists, wore the same message: regardless of the efforts of the Trump government, China, and what problems their economy may have, China's development of AI, robotics and other digital industries.
“If you are blocked, you can always find a different way,” said Kong Fuan, the secretary of the Communist Party at the Hongqiao Overseas Development Service Center, a government office in Shanghai who works to attract foreign investments and talents and to help Chinese companies become “global”.
While the United States make it more difficult and more expensive for companies to bring in foreign workers, “we always open up to talents from all over the world,” said Kong.
China introduces a new kind of visa that should make it easier for graduates of top universities in natural sciences, technology, engineering or mathematics to travel to China to study or do business.
In Hefei, a city west of Shanghai, which was transformed into a high-tech center by a shabby backwater, IFlytek, a AI company, stands as a powerful rejection of Mr. Trump's policy towards China. The company showed a wide range of new products that have been developed since the first Trump administration in 2019 to consider a black list of US Chinese companies about their role in alleged human rights violations. The move effectively blocked Iflytek from the purchase of American products, but did not slow down its ambitions.
Since then, the company has moved to a extensive new office campus that is strikingly futuristic.
The newly developed products include a device for evaluating school exams and a KI chat bot that can answer in one of half a dozen different languages, including Chinese, English and Russian, to a microphone. The answers are displayed on a screen. (Asked why Russia entered Ukraine, the chat bot quoted Russian security concerns, but also said that President Vladimir V. Putin promoted Untrain Propaganda and used the war to distract the attention of Russian “stagnating economy”.)
Cheng Chen, General Manager of the IFlytek consumer group responsible for the AI translation, said the goal of the examination machine, which enables teachers to read papers without them, was not to help the teachers, but “to help them use their time better for creative, essential things”. F
Without restrictions on the export of AI chips for advanced American AI chips to China, which were “the best for the training of large-scaling models”, she had insisted that the Chinese company Huawei provided appropriate substitute substances.
Iflytek, which the state -owned China Mobile has as the largest shareholder, has more than doubled his share price since Mr. Trump imposed sanctions. The youngest US China trade friction had little effect on the market value.
Last week reports that China had banned its largest technology companies from buying the American company NVIDIA, which sold the most advanced AI chips, increased the message that China could do it alone.
The attempt to ensure that this can do this was a cornerstone of Chinese state policy under XI Jinping, China's top guide. In recent years, Mr. XI has regularly demanded “independence” and resolved again-“Zili Gengsheng”-that Mao Zedong used in order to promote catastrophic policy of economic self-highs that broke off China from the world.
The version of Mr. XI of independence does not aim to isolate China, but to ensure that the party keeps control of all foreigners that could question national sovereignty. In the world of high-tech innovation, the President told a meeting in Politburo in April, which means the creation of an “autonomously controllable” ecosystem of AI hardware and software.
There are serious boundaries of how far China can go on itself, how the hunger for foreign sales, which are issued by many of the high-tech companies, jump their goods.
China has stacked ever larger trade surpluses, which was responsible for up to half of the country's economic growth last year and fell silent about the pain of a long -term real estate crash.
China's trade with the United States has dropped greatly since Mr. Trump's took office and has been hammered from uncertainties over the tariffs. However, his general surplus is on the right track, even the enormous gap between what he buys and sells it, even survives last year.
And whether it can really do without the most advanced American AI chips is open to debates. On the Hangzhou Expo, Chen Jiaxin, Marketing Manager for UNTREE Robotics, spoke excitedly about the breakthroughs of the Chinese company in the development of human robots that can dance and box. But she avoided all questions about the effects of US export restrictions on chips and general trade friction. “It is not easy to answer,” she said.
The company, which could perhaps give the clearest answer, is Deepseek, a small Chinese start-up that amazed the Silicon Valley last year by unveiling a new AI system, which coincided with Nvidia chips with the skills of chatbots, which were developed at far greater costs of giants such as Openai and Google.
Deepseek had a stand on the Hangzhou Digital Expo. But perhaps carefully with answering sensitive questions about whether it delayed the publication of a new AI model this summer due to problems with Chinese replacement chips, it left its status on the Expo. A poster with his logo put on and did not provide any further information.