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China Industry Close-up: How long does it take to build a robot in China? In Shenzhen’s Robot Valley, it can be done in half an hour_我的网站

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    A display of humanoid fighting robots at robotic firm EngineAI's intelligent manufacturing base in Robot Valley in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province on August 5. Photo: Li Xuanmin/GT
Editor's Note:
The outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan called for building a modern industrial system, consolidating the foundation of the real economy, and accelerating high-level technological self-reliance and self-strength to lead the development of new quality productive forces. These goals have provided clear direction for industrial transformation and upgrading across various sectors, while injecting strong momentum into high-quality development.
The Global Times has launched a new column titled "China Industry Close-up." Focusing on the creation of a new development pattern, the column will delve deeply into vivid examples of industrial transformation and upgrading across various sectors, aiming to showcase China's innovation-driven and high-quality development. This is the first half of the second installment of the series
Cao Jing, a truck driver based in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, carefully secured a humanoid robot at the research and development center of a local robotics company on Friday. With steady hands, he and other technical staff first folded the robot and placed it into a black box filled with cushioning pads, then moved the box into the back of his 4.2-meter-long truck, adjusting the straps and padding to keep it steady for the journey. Once everything was firmly in place, he climbed into the cab and set off along the Liuxian Road in Shenzhen's Nanshan district.
Half an hour later, he arrived at the Shenzhen Nursing Home, where the robot would soon begin its new role -serving as a cheerful companion for the elderly while continuously improving itself through daily real-scenario applications.
Cao, a driver for freight company Huolala's enterprise service, told the Global Times that since March and April, he can get four or five such delivery orders a day during peak times, mostly around Liuxian Road, a sharp increase from last year. "The robots I transport have also become much more diverse — from company R&D prototypes and household robots being delivered to customers' homes for testing, to robots designed for all kinds of competition, and even those fighting robots that compete in the octagon," Cao said as he waited at a traffic light on Liuxian Road.
The Liuxian Road is located within the 30-minute supporting circle in Shenzhen's "Robot Valley," an idea that Chinese official highlighted at the 2026 Summer Davos in June. 
Just a decade ago, some of this area was little more than old industrial zones, construction sites and urban villages. Today, the Robot Valley — stretching about 10 kilometers along Liuxian Road and covering an area of approximately 28 square kilometers — has transformed into a thriving hub. The corridor is lined on both sides with robot makers, component suppliers, software algorithm firms, as well as universities and research institutions.
The area is now home to over 200 companies across the robotics industrial chain, including more than 25 humanoid robot complete-machine manufacturers, 32 specialized and sophisticated "little giant" enterprises, and 15 listed companies, according to local authorities.
Walking through parts of the valley now feels like stepping into a sci-fi film, where it is common to encounter a "blinking" humanoid robot waving hands around the corner, watch a lively parade of dancing robot dogs and sip a coffee made by humanoid robot, or enjoy a dish prepared by robotic arms.
The rise of this high-tech futuristic valley offers a glimpse into the prowess of China's embodied artificial intelligence (AI) industry, one of the industries of the future identified in China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) that has drawn intensive global limelight. The valley also epitomizes China's homegrown innovation capabilities, where milestone technological breakthroughs, coupled with rapid iteration, complete industrial chains, and real-world application scenarios converge to turn cutting-edge research into tangible products at remarkable "Chinese speed."
'Half-hour circle'

When Global Times reporters visited Shenzhen robotic firm EngineAI's intelligent manufacturing base in the Robot Valley, several humanoid robots were effortlessly demonstrating high-difficulty moves such as front flips. Some of the T800robots, just backed from the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend (URKL), or what organizers billed as the world's first free humanoid robot fighting competition in July, were "battered and bruised." 
"In robot combat, we must always be prepared for high-intensity real-world testing," Li Hao, a motion control algorithm engineer at EngineAI, told the Global Times. "Real combat takes place in a continuous, highly uncertain environment full of interference. The real challenge is ensuring that humanoid robots can continuously maintain stability under complex conditions such as moving, turning, punching, absorbing force, and shifts in the center of gravity. In this context, the pace of research and development (R&D), testing, and adjustment is particularly fast — which is why the half-hour industrial circle matters so much to us."
Li gave a vivid example of how his daily routine fully leverages the valley's tight integration of R&D, testing, and manufacturing.
"In the morning, I finish modifying the algorithm at the R&D center. A 25-minute drive then takes me to the production line at the valley's Honghualing manufacturing base for real-machine testing. By the afternoon, I can rush back to the R&D center to upgrade and optimize the algorithm again," he explained.
Since March, Li has been taking Muay Thai lessons together with other core engineers. While he has grown into something of a "Muay Thai master," this proximity of the Robot Valley also allows him to "communicate with robots" every day, optimizing intelligent recognition algorithms and motion strategies based on their performance in real combat. "This is like teaching a baby, and we're training the robots to grow stronger while becoming smarter, day by day," he noted.
Throughout the robot manufacturing, another critical step — robot prototyping — further highlights the unique strength of China's robotics industry.
Pang Jianxin, vice president of UBTECH, a Hong Kong-listed humanoid robot company also headquartered at the Robot Valley, told the Global Times that the valley holds a clear advantage in rapid prototyping and fast product iteration — an edge that "leads the world."
"During prototyping, the volume for production is usually very small, and many companies are reluctant to take on such orders. However, in Shenzhen and the broader Pearl River Delta, there are a large number of supply chain enterprises that are willing to accompany start-ups on new tracks and new products. Based on the design, they can leverage their experience to select suitable materials or processes, quickly complete sample manufacturing, and then rapidly verify the results. This is crucial for hardware R&D, especially for innovative hardware and intelligent robots," Pang explained.
In overseas markets such as the US, the typical process from turning an idea into a physical product, to producing samples and entering the small-scale market, and finally reaching mass production and making debut, could take five-to-ten times longer than the Chinese counterparts, Liu Shaoshan, director of the Embodied AI at the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society, told the Global Times. Liu has worked in the US for a bunch of years before returning to Shenzhen two years ago.
"Robotics is an industry where speed almost decides everything - as half of it is manufacturing, and the other half is about R&D," Liu told the Global Times. 
According to Liu, in the US, it can take a week just for industrial chain communication to implement a hardware change or upgrade, and most of their suppliers are located outside the country, which further delays the process. By contrast, the complete supply chain of Shenzhen's Robot Valley enables highly efficient communication — "in some cases, suppliers can even arrive on site within half an hour."
The Global Times also noticed a telling scene during its week-long visit to Shenzhen's Robot Valley: the company visited on the first day turned out to be the exact supplier of the company visited on the second day, while the third-day institute was itself a key testing partner of the second-day company — further underscoring the tightly integrated industrial ecosystem that makes rapid iteration possible.
For embodied intelligence manufactures, the Robot Valley is home to a full range of upstream suppliers — from perception systems such as tactile sensors and LiDAR, to actuation systems including servo motors and joint modules, and core components like robotic arms and dexterous hands. Meanwhile, downstream, large-scale manufacturers in the auto, new energy and electronic industries stand ready to put these robots into broader real-world applications, industry insiders noted.
"Many of the embodied robotics companies in the valley are our customers. Some of them — such as UBTECH, X Square and PUDU — are within a 20-minute drive of our headquarters. It is not an exaggeration to say that if you want to build a robot in Shenzhen's Robot Valley, you can easily find the suppliers you need nearby," Zhao Qiyu, marketing director of publicly listed robotics and AI vision company Orbbec, told the Global Times.
Meanwhile, as China's robotics industry continues to expand, downstream customers are developing increasingly specialized and specific requirements, encouraging companies like Orbbec to launch new products that address these evolving needs, Zhao said. 
She cited one of the company's newly launched products, EGO, a head-mounted data collection device designed to capture first-person perspectives and real-world task flows. By collecting multimodal data related to environmental semantics, spatial scale and long-horizon task chains, the device helps generate high-quality training data for downstream embodied AI model companies.
'DeepSeek' moment in robotics industry

Pang from UBTECH recalled firsthand how he has witnessed the drastic change in Shenzhen's Robot Valley and the broader picture of the Chinese robotic industry during the past 10 years.
"When we started the company a decade ago, what we saw from the window was just old industrial base, some construction sites and villages. We were like marching through a dark desert, where even the positions of the stars and the moon could not be seen clearly," Pang said. 
He noted that at that time, the most well-known robotics companies on the international stage were the US-based Boston Dynamics, which wooed the world with its signature backflips and parkour moves, and Honda from Japan, whose humanoid robot ASIMO became a global icon. In the Chinese market, domestic companies specialized in humanoid robots "were extremely scarce."
However, a decade later, China's robotics industry has undergone what industry insiders described as "transformative changes," shifting from a follower to a frontrunner. The once "valley of entrepreneurship" has also transformed into a world-class "highland of innovation," Liu Zhufu, deputy general manager of Dobot Robotics, which was founded in 2015, told the Global Times.
Today, China has firmly established itself in the world's first tier of the robotics industry, with Chinese robotics companies having increasingly become a must-visit destination for foreign heads of state during their trips to China - as vividly exemplified by Slovak President Peter Pellegrini's tour of a robotics mall in Beijing's Yizhuang in July and President of Myanmar Min Aung Hlaing' visit to the Unitree Robotics in June.
According to data released by Beijing CCID Publishing & Media Co, China accounted for 84.7 percent of global humanoid robot shipments in 2025, meaning that for every 10 humanoid robots sold worldwide, more than 8 carried the "Made in China" label.
The institute Liu Shaoshan works for has also received a number of officials from Europe, including former UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, as well as corporate delegates from Europe, Japan and South Korea in recent months. 
"Many foreign visitors, during their inspections in Shenzhen, would ask me similar questions — why have cutting-edge technologies such as AI and embodied intelligence developed particularly rapidly in China? What can they learn, and what role should their governments play in accelerating this development?"
The answers, according to Liu, lie not in a single technological breakthrough, but in a combination of long-term strategic planning, industrial cultivation, and ecosystem building. "It is precisely thanks to the forward-looking layout and top-level design that China has gradually formed a complete chain spanning basic research, core technology breakthroughs, and industrial applications, while gaining a first-mover advantage in the real-world deployment of robots," Liu stressed. 
"China has been promoting the development of the humanoid robotics industry with unprecedented strategic resolve. And the inclusion of intelligent AI into the 15th Five-Year plan (2026-30) carries a lot of significance: it is not only a policy dividend but also offers long-term strategic guidance. It will guide more resources toward core technology breakthroughs and industrial ecosystem building, accelerating the process of humanoid robots moving from the laboratory to factories and into households," Pang said. 
When it comes to the local practice echoing this top-level design, the authorities in Shenzhen's Nanshan District have so far opened a total of 68 public scenarios for robot applications, aiming to open up the full chain of "technology R&D - scenario verification - commercial promotion," the Global Times learned.
Encouraged by these developments, industry insiders in the Robot Valley are increasingly optimistic that a "DeepSeek moment" for China's homegrown robotics industry may arrive sooner rather than later.
This moment may not come in a single instant, but a process accumulated from countless "world's firsts" - fueled by continuous homegrown technological breakthroughs and the constant expansion of application scenarios across China.
"Maybe one day, robots will be able to produce robots right here in our manufacturing base—that could be a defining 'DeepSeek moment'," Yao Qiyuan, co-founder of EngineAI, told the Global Times.
。          　　走进淄博八大局便民市场，穿过熙熙攘攘的主街，拐入主街旁边的书画苑，眼前的一幕让人恍惚：一张张餐桌上摆着淄博烧烤的烤串、薄饼、小葱“标配三件套”，食客们熟练地撸串、蘸酱、卷饼，而几步之外，竟是一座灯光闪烁的舞台。     　　舞台上鼓点铿锵，演员们水袖翻飞，正演绎着“姜子牙封齐”的故事。灯光闪烁间，让人以为走进了剧场。其实，这是一家烧烤店，在这里，边吃烧烤边看演出不是噱头，而是日常。      　　这家店最多可同时容纳600人就餐，即便体量如此，晚上营业高峰时仍常常一座难求，店门口排起等位的长队。有游客笑言：“烧烤管饱，演出管够，情绪价值直接拉满。”      　　淄博烧烤的“进化”，是有迹可循的。

二 | 当地从业者给记者梳理了一条清晰的升级路线：1.0版本是露天支桌、马扎围坐的简易就餐;2.0版本搬进室内、装上空调;3.0版本增加了驻唱表演;到了4.0版本，则全面融入齐文化等在地文化演艺。     　　这个新形态的诞生，源于淄博烧烤爆火之后的一场“腾笼换鸟”。彼时，流量骤至，当地顺势盘活存量空间：市场内一座市公交公司的闲置院落被改造升级为演艺式烧烤场所，老旧场地“摇身一变”，成了年轻人追捧的打卡地。阿淄烧烤正是这一时期招商引入的项目，占地1200平方米，以沉浸式剧场串联起姜子牙封齐、聊斋秘境、周村大染坊等文化故事，让游客在烟火气里触摸三千年的齐韵。     　　2025年8月，八大局阿淄烧烤店开始引入常态化演艺，所有演出对游客免费开放。“我们在运营中发现，游客来到八大局后，单纯的美食打卡很快就结束了。为了让大家不仅吃得好，还能真正了解淄博、记住淄博，我们在八大局市场内打造了阿淄烧烤、淄博宴、聊斋茶馆三个文旅餐饮项目。”阿淄烧烤、淄博宴、聊斋茶馆负责人郑峰告诉记者。

三 |      　　效果立竿见影。“目前这种新模式的效果特别好，很多游客都是边吃美食边看演出，剧场接待量持续走高，很多游客由此对齐国的历史有了更加直观的了解。”郑峰说。

四 |      　　新业态长得快，老市场的管理也跟得上。

五 | 八大局市场管理办公室负责人郑昊林介绍，市场坚持“始于烟火，兴于诚信”，每季度开展诚信商户评定，实行一店一码，消费纠纷可快速处理，市场内还设置了公平秤，用实实在在的办法擦亮“人好物美心齐”的淄博招牌。     　　如今的八大局便民市场，430余家商户集聚百余种业态，年均接待游客约1800万人次，带动就业2000余人次，被网友称为“全国最牛的5A级菜市场”。

六 | 每天下午5点半，主街准时上演巡游;每逢周末，古风NPC快闪互动穿插其间。游客在这里不再是简单地逛吃买东西，而是沉浸式地游玩体验。     　　2023年，淄博烧烤凭“小饼卷一切”火遍全网;三年过去，当不少“网红”城市的热度归于平淡，淄博却把流量酿成了“留量”。     　　烧烤还是那口烧烤，但淄博人给它加了一出戏、一段历史、一份文化。郑峰表示，下一步还将挖掘淄博五区三县更多的在地文化，融入烧烤店的演出之中。

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