This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Head in hands, 8-year-old Timmy mutters to himself as he tries to beat an artificial intelligence-powered robot in a game of chess. This is not an AI showroom or an AI lab. This is a middle-class living room in Beijing.

“It’s like a little teacher or a little friend,” he says, as the mechanical arm moves another chess piece. China is embracing AI in its bid to become a global technology leader by 2030, and Timmy’s mom, Yan Xue, wants to be ahead of the curve.

“This is an inevitable trend that we will coexist with AI. Children should get to know it as soon as possible,” she says.

This is what the Communist Party hopes to hear as it pushes AI development to revive the Chinese economy.

At an exhibition in Shanghai, you get a glimpse of that development. Two teams of robots compete at soccer. Their moves are not perfect — when they fall over, they need a little help getting back up.

Humanoid robots also walk among us, alongside backflipping, doglike bots made by a rising star in China called Unitree. But there’s one name on everyone’s mind.

DeepSeek is a breakthrough Chinese chatbot that caught the world’s attention in January. It was seen as proof that Chinese companies can overcome U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors.

Interest in AI is now fostered at an early age in China. An 8-year-old boy is working on a dinosaur robot. He’s also learning to code to make it move forward and backward and, of course, roar. These bots are meant to amuse and educate children as young as 3 across the world, but made here in China.

“Other countries have AI education robots as well,” said Abbott Lyu, vice president of Whalesbot. “But when it comes to competitiveness and smart hardware, China is doing better.”

Lyu added: “DeepSeek is worth 10 billion yuan [more than $1.3 billion] of advertising for China’s AI industry. It has let the public know that AI is not just a concept, but it can indeed change people’s lives. It has inspired public curiosity.”

China has more graduates in science, technology, engineering and math than anywhere else in the world. That gives it an edge. As companies plan their next move, President Xi Jinping continues to invest heavily in preparation for a race against the U.S. in AI, robots and advanced technology.