At the Canton Fair, a 98-Year-Old Regular and a Gym in the Subway
The most devoted visitor to the 140th Canton Fair is 98 and has come for seventy straight editions — and this year's fair he walked offers robots that climb facades and a 10,000-square-metre gym inside the metro station beneath the halls. Both stories say the same thing about how China's flagship trade fair now sells itself.
The most devoted visitor to the 140th Canton Fair is 98 years old and has been coming, by his own count, for seventy straight years. Xue Rongxin joined the crowds at the fairground in Guangzhou again this edition, tried on new AI glasses, pitted himself against a robotic hand, and delivered the line state television chose as its hook: "The Canton Fair is my school — every edition has something new to learn."
The fair he keeps attending is China's largest trade event, an institution whose 140th edition opened this week expecting some 340,000 overseas buyers and carrying a record share of first-showing products. What has changed is what sits on the tables: the crowds this year formed around exoskeleton suits, 3D printers and robots, not the toys and textiles of the fair's founding decades.
This edition's state-media catalogue reads like a lab inventory. CCTV's cameras found a "dexterous hand" that lifts nearly 20 kilograms with a single finger, and a facade-climbing "spider" robot for high-rise work rated to hold on through force-12 winds. Another CCTV dispatch described robot makers moving "from selling products to building systems" — exporting whole automation setups, not just units.
The fair's gravity even shows underground. At Pazhou station, the metro stop that empties into the fairground, one fairgoer's post went viral this week: a fully equipped gym — treadmills, weight machines, a boxing ring, hyrox and pickleball zones — spread across some 10,000 square metres of the station complex, with foreign visitors stopping dead on their way to the auto-parts exhibits. "Guangzhou Metro is simply too authoritative," she wrote — netizen for unbeatable — adding that prices match street gyms and, the real kicker, "I'm not worried about Guangzhou Metro doing a runner." Any Chinese gym member parses that instantly: prepaid memberships that vanish with the owner are a standing national anxiety, and the state-owned metro is one operator nobody expects to abscond.
Seventy years of returning make Xue something close to the fair's living memory — he started coming when the exhibits were the agricultural produce and sewing machines of a newly open China. The fair he walked this week was selling robots that scale skyscrapers and hands that lift like a hook, in a host city that has learned to entertain the world between meetings. And the buyers have changed their own routine: Global Times's report described foreign merchants who lock an order at a booth on debut day, then caravan straight to the supplier's factory to see the line with their own eyes. The goods, increasingly, are not the pitch; the system behind them is.