Made in China 2025 Improved Robot Quality. Core Components Still Come from Japan (www.governance.fyi)

A paper analyzing China’s Made in China 2025 pilot (12 cities, 604 listed robotics firms, 398,872 patents from 2010–2023) finds the program substantially raised robotics innovation quality in application and assembly but not in core components. Using a PageRank-style patent citation network to weight patent influence, the authors report a 15.9% average quality gain in pilot cities after 2017, with downstream system integrators up 23.4% and midstream robot-body makers up 17.3%. By contrast, upstream component firms (reducers, controllers, sensors; 209 firms) showed no statistically significant improvement. China’s domestic industrial-robot market share rose to 52.45% by 2023 and exports grew 86.4%, while robustness checks (propensity score matching, entropy balancing, placebo tests) and alternative metrics (invention/utility patents, forward citations) support the result. The paper attributes gains to four mechanisms: targeted R&D subsidies (innovation subsidies +67.2%), stronger IP enforcement, accelerated robot adoption (installation density +111.8%), and upgraded human capital. It highlights why upstream work lagged: long 5–10 year development cycles, materials science and precision-manufacturing bottlenecks, and scale-intensive investment needs—areas where Japanese firms still dominate. Policy implications stress mission-driven long-horizon funding, tech-acquisition incentives, IP infrastructure, and network-based evaluation to match instruments to the technological characteristics of different value-chain segments. The study shows industrial policy can accelerate commercialization and systems innovation but cannot shortcut generational expertise in core component science without tailored, patient interventions.