China's factories run more than two million industrial robots

At a factory in Chengdu, workers assemble robotic arms while young engineers prototype a machine that could one day build more robots. In Hangzhou, the Leapmotor plant is already almost fully automated across stamping, welding and painting. A BBC tour of both sites captured the scale of a change now visible on factory floors: China operates more than two million industrial robots.

The momentum is not confined to a handful of plants. BYD, Geely, Leapmotor and Seres are pushing their automation rates higher, while medical-robot research continues alongside industrial work. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which tracks the sector, puts China above 500 robots per 10,000 workers, ahead of Germany and Japan. China has also been the world's largest industrial-robot market for 13 consecutive years.

The manufacturing pipeline is expanding at the same time. Official figures cited in the report show 773,000 industrial robots produced in 2025 and 538,000 made in the first half of 2026, up 28 percent year on year. China produces more than half of the world's industrial-robot supply. The IFR's secretary-general linked that position to the country's manufacturing ecosystem: in Shenzhen, components can reportedly be sourced in under an hour, compared with about a week in Europe.

That industrial demand is reshaping education. At Hangzhou Technical College, Chen Tianyu, a 28-year-old robotics teacher, visits factories in his spare time and brings those lessons back to the classroom. Students learn to program industrial robots, and many graduates are reserved by employers before they finish. The message is practical: the jobs are arriving alongside the machines, but the skills required are changing quickly.

The concrete effect is already being felt by manufacturers, students and workers. Factories can automate more of the production process; vocational students gain a direct route into robotics and smart manufacturing; and employers get a deeper pool of trained recruits. The limit is equally concrete: the latest production figures are official figures cited by the report, and no independent audit or separate real-world assessment is provided here. Washington's July ban on imports of new Chinese humanoid robots adds geopolitical context, but the underlying shift is taking place in factories, classrooms and supply chains.