中国制造的机器人

Shanghai has been taken over by some of the most intelligent robots known to mankind.

Well, not quite.

But what is true is that the world's producers of the most advanced industrial robots brought their latest designs to China to try and get buyers in what is the world's fastest growing robotics market.

The North Asia and China head of ABB, a Swiss engineering company, Gu Chunyuan, who spoke at the trade show, says China will become the largest robotics market in the future.

Gu says that this is inevitable in a country where labour costs are rising and there's pressure to undergo an industrial upgrade.

Dr Tang Min is a former Chief Economist at the Asian Development Bank and the current Deputy Director of You Change Foundation, a social enterprise and poverty reduction NGO.

He says the effect on the workers will depend on whether robotics in manufacturing takes off quickly in the short term:

"I think that depends on what the scale. If it's a small scale I think it will help because in the robot area is the area which may be dangerous or an environment that is not feasible for human being there or for some reason they can do it quicker, so in that sense I think it will be an improvement of the worker's situation. On the other hand if it's very, very large scale and replace workers and they may some of the workers may be replaced by the robots, in fact China has a labour shortage. I think over all it should be a positive."

The International Federation of Robotics' latest figures show that installation of multi-role robots in factories grew in China by 136 percent from 2008 to 2011.

However, China's robot-use is still lagging far behind other major industrialized economies such as Germany and Japan.

At less than half the world average, China uses 21 robots per 10,000 workers compared to Germany's 251 and Japans 339.

But Dr Tang says that the real challenge is the inflexibility of China's labour market, caused partly by a lack of proper training programs.

"China's training programs are still week. The biggest challenge now is that China has a labour shortage. The problem is that China's industry is also upgrading, this structural change may require higher skilled labour and if the current labour does not get good training, later this generation of labour will have some problems."

Either way there is a long time to come before robotics will be the main concern of the labour market in China.

For CRI I'm Alexandra Blucher.