China tops 2 million industrial robots, but quality risks linger behind its volume-driven push

China’s robot rollout cements its global lead
Massive state support accelerates robot deployment
Volume-driven growth is now showing its limits

China installed nearly 300,000 industrial robots last year, further strengthening its status as a “robot powerhouse.” Massive domestic manufacturing demand, coupled with aggressive subsidies and infrastructure investment from central and local governments, has accelerated expansion across the robotics sector. But on the ground, repeated shutdowns of robots deployed without verified quality, durability, or continuous-operation stability have exposed clear limits to China’s quantity-driven growth model.

Manufacturing base drives concentrated robot demand

According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) on the 26th, China deployed 95,000 robots in industrial settings last year, surpassing the combined total of all other countries. As a result, the number of industrial robots operating in China has exceeded 2 million units. IFR highlighted the rapid emergence of large-scale automation needs across Chinese manufacturing as the main driver. Strategic sectors such as electronics and auto parts saw surging demand for precision production, sharply increasing robot adoption. Even traditional industries categorized as sunset sectors accelerated robot deployment to overhaul outdated production lines, pushing nationwide installation volumes higher.

China’s internal manufacturing demand has become the central engine behind the robot boom. Since the early 2020s, the government and industry have moved to automate entire production-to-export processes with artificial intelligence. Apparel manufacturers have shortened sample-making time by over 70 percent with AI tools, and appliance makers have introduced AI “factory brains” to optimize washing-machine assembly lines. As production processes became more segmented and data usage more frequent, robots emerged as the core integrator of factory operations. Robots thereby shifted from optional tools to essential prerequisites across China’s strategic industries.

China’s presence is also striking in the World Economic Forum’s annual “lighthouse factory” designations, which evaluate productivity based on AI and advanced technologies. Of the 131 factories named this year, 45 were located in mainland China, compared with only three in the United States. The WEF noted that China “has built an environment where its multilayered industrial base rapidly fuses with robotic technologies.” For instance, at Baosteel’s Shanghai site, AI adoption reduced manual intervention intervals for equipment adjustments from every three minutes to every 30 minutes — an outcome attributed to tight integration between robots and data-driven systems.

China’s densely interconnected supply chain is another foundation of its robotics ascent. In regions such as the Yangtze River Delta (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai) and the Pearl River Delta (Shenzhen, Dongguan), cities host full clusters of component suppliers — including reducers, servomotors, controllers, sensors, and batteries — along with system integrators. This “mega-cluster” structure shortens development timelines and sharply reduces costs. It also enabled consumer-robot makers like Roborock to scale rapidly in the domestic market and expand globally.

Project-driven state support accelerates industrial growth

Massive central-government support has been indispensable to China’s robotics rise. Over the past decade, Beijing has declared robotics a national strategic industry under initiatives such as Made in China 2025, the 13th Five-Year Plan, the Robotics Industry Development Plan (2016–2020), and the 14th Five-Year Plan. In 2023, the government announced a “Robotics Plus Application Action Plan,” targeting a doubling of manufacturing robot density compared with 2020 and development of more than 100 innovative application solutions. These continuous policies linked funding, R&D, testing, standardization, and applied deployment into a single pipeline, accelerating sector-wide development.

Local governments intensified support with their own strategies. Beijing launched a Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and a research-funding program worth up to 3,000 million dollars. Shanghai used its “high-quality robotics innovation plan” to build a collaborative innovation system combining large-scale AI models with public service platforms. Shenzhen pushed to create a humanoid-robot manufacturing innovation center leveraging Guangdong’s manufacturing base, while Anhui announced plans for innovation centers in Hefei and Wuhu aimed at large-scale commercialization by 2030. This competitive wave of support extended beyond subsidies, expanding robotics clusters across multiple layers.

Direct consumer and corporate subsidies also accelerated adoption and price reductions. At the world’s first “Robot Consumer Festival,” held in Beijing Yizhuang in August, individuals received purchase subsidies of up to 212 dollars, and corporate buyers up to 35,000 dollars. Forty-one companies exhibited more than 100 robots, and a dedicated “4S” showroom offered embodied-intelligence robots for enterprise clients. These programs were designed to rapidly lower adoption barriers through subsidies, demonstrations, and hands-on experiences.

China also lowered industrial cost structures by linking fiscal incentives to broader policy frameworks. Through a national venture-capital guidance fund worth 1,380 billion dollars and a state-run AI investment fund totaling 82 billion dollars, China directed capital across the robotics value chain — supporting infrastructure build-out, compute-voucher programs, and research institutes, effectively reducing manufacturing costs. Building on this, China introduced the world’s first “humanoid robot intelligence grading standard,” establishing evaluation criteria ahead of global competitors. Such governance tools serve not only to define international norms but also to accelerate overseas adoption of Chinese robots.

Unresolved issues: precision control and performance instability

Despite China’s ambitious plans, persistent quality and reliability issues continue to hinder the robotics sector. China has poured enormous investments into humanoid, service, and industrial robots, but on-site results remain at an early stage. Most industrial robots still focus on structured tasks such as logistics handling and simple assembly. In unstructured situations that require judgment under uncertainty, they fall well short of replacing humans. As a result, the gap between China’s stated ambitions and the technical reality has become widely recognized as the first major test for its robotics industry.

Scenes from the field illustrate these limits. In the alleys of Shanghai’s Pudong high-tech district, abandoned one-person AI clinics and powered-off AI drug dispensers — rusting like scrap metal — can be found easily. Although promoted with promises of contactless diagnosis, unmanned payments, and automated waste sorting, they suffered from recognition errors, malfunctions, and user inconvenience, leading to abandonment. Despite being branded as “advanced technology laboratories,” they became symbols of immature products causing confusion rather than efficiency.

In humanoid robotics, companies prioritized price competition over solving these performance issues. Unitree’s humanoid robot G1, for example, features a height of 135 centimeters, weight of 35 kilograms, 43 degrees of freedom, peak torque of 120 N·m, and two-hour battery life — yet is priced around 16,000 dollars. In comparison, Boston Dynamics’ quadruped Spot costs about 74,500 dollars. Chinese firms thus sent a clear message that they intend to disrupt the market through aggressive pricing.

But global competitiveness requires more than low prices and high volumes. Chinese companies have often released products with unstable technology and improved them through rapid feedback loops — a strategy that worked in drones, electric vehicles, and batteries. Robotics, however, demands continuous operation, safety, and high-precision control. China’s robotics future will depend on how quickly it can build credible safety systems and quality-certification frameworks — not merely on capital or data scale.