Robotics roadmaps from around the world spotlight of the month: China

China is targeting the next industrial revolution by doubling down on embodied AI and humanoid robotics, building directly on its vast manufacturing infrastructure.

By Ellen H. Rumley and Allison Okamura

Beyond the Robot Olympics

Chinese robots have quickly entered global public consciousness in recent years, appearing as background robo-dancers in pop concerts and as humanoid marathon and sprint runners outpacing elite athletes ( 1 ). Domestically, robots are deployed as traffic guides and restaurant service staff, while swarms of drones entertain audiences in urban light shows or deliver takeout to high-rises ( 2 , 3 ). These public debuts serve to both normalize automation in everyday civilian life ( 4 ) while projecting international soft power.

Behind the public spectacle lies a bold agenda for global economic dominance. In its geopolitical contest with the United States, Beijing sees robotics as the core engine to project power and dictate the future of global supply chains ( 5 ). This ambition is further accelerated by domestic drivers of an aging population and a shrinking industrial workforce, compounded by the legacy of the one-child policy and rapid urbanization. Alongside targeted talent acquisition initiatives like the K-Visa ( 6 , 7 ), China aims to pioneer a new era of industrial leadership while mitigating a long-term structural gap through a state-orchestrated robotics surge.

Five-Year Plans (FYPs)

The Chinese Communist Party leverages its central authority to align state enterprise, private capital, and supply chains towards common strategic objectives, carrying the momentum to implement sweeping technological changes. Since the 1950s, every five years the government has produced large-scale roadmaps detailing major objectives mandated across its various levels of government. Called the Five-Year Plans (FYPs) – these documents provide bold economic development initiatives that are credited for structural reform like the opening of China to foreign trade in the 1980s ( 8 ). The FYPs have been influential in strengthening the nation’s manufacturing base and is now playing a defining role in advancing Chinese robotics.

FYP13 & FYP14: Made in China

The 13th FYP (2016-2020) laid the critical foundation of China’s robotics ascent and operationalized Made in China 2025 (MIC2025), a campaign to transition China from a “low-cost global factory floor” into a sovereign high-tech manufacturing leader ( 9 ). While most leading industrial nations historically outsourced production, China, as a historical receiver of outsourced production, took advantage of their vast manufacturing infrastructure to invest early into physical foundries and integrated supply chains that many nations are now spending heavily on to re-shore within their own borders ( 10 ). Key goals of MIC2025 were to climb up the global value chain across strategic sectors like robotics, using massive government subsidies to offset production costs ( 11 ). While many international critics condemned these subsidies as market distortion and imposed sanctions as a response ( 12 ), paradoxically this intensified Beijing’s efforts towards a sovereign tech sector.

Foreign frictions did ultimately lead Beijing to retire the branding “Made in China 2025”, but its core robotics objectives were carried out through focused sectoral plans in the 14th FYP (2021-2025). The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) even introduced two robot-specific initiatives: the “14th Five Year Plan for the Robotics Industry” (2021), which granted state-support for R&Ds in an effort to replace foreign suppliers of critical robotic components with domestic supplies, as well as the “Robot + Application Action Plan” (2023), which stimulated robotics demand by mandating adoption of domestic robotics across ten key sectors including agriculture, logistics, and health. This dual coordination of supply and demand, along with the push for general industrial leadership, enabled several impressive milestones to be achieved by 2025: China increased domestic market shares in industrial robots from 30% to 57% within a decade ( 13 , 14 ), and domestic suppliers for industrial robots became market leaders for the first time ( 15 ). They reached 295,000 units of industrial robot installations in 2025 alone – 54% of all global installations that year – and entered the top five global manufacturers rankings for industrial robotics. Regional robotics hubs also flourished, including AI R&D clusters in Shanghai, hardware manufacturing bases in the Yangtze River Delta ( 16 ) and a growing startup ecosystem in Shenzhen ( 17 ) – creating a full-stack environment capable of rapidly prototyping fully integrated robotic systems. Local sourcing of many basic hardware components was further made possible by the massive mining and refining infrastructure that China possesses – which processes over 70% of the global production of rare earths like neodymium, which are critical for hardware like electromagnetic motors ( 18 ).

Bottlenecks in Precision Hardware & Semiconductors

The 13th and 14th FYPs propelled China into a position of industrial robotic leadership in production scale, installation quantity, and cost effectiveness. Despite their indisputable achievements, some critical milestones were not met. For one, domestic robotics supply chains did not approach the levels of self-sufficiency expected by 2025. While Chinese robotics command near totality of domestic market shares in lower-stakes industries like textiles, they captured closer to 30% of domestic market shares for higher stakes sectors like automotive industries ( 5 ), and even less so – at 15% – for high-end machine tools ( 19 ). This disparity stems from a historical deficit in high-precision engineering in China. Key components essential for durable industrial-grade robots, such as strain-wave reducers, precision gearboxes, and high-performance servo motors, remain…

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