In a park in Shenzhen in July 2025, a drone descended onto the roof of a pickup station, carrying fried chicken and an iced cola. A reporter for Spain's La Vanguardia, Alejandro Perez, entered a code on a touchscreen at the station's base and collected the meal he had ordered through a mobile app minutes earlier. No courier, no motorcycle, no cash – just 20 minutes from order to pickup.

"I felt like I was living in 2040," he wrote after watching three separate deliveries land within half an hour. "And this is already an ordinary day in Shenzhen."

Scenes like this have become a genre of their own on social media. In December 2024, British vloggers Reanne and Ben posted a two-minute video about their stay at a hotel in Chengdu, where lights and curtains responded to voice commands and a robot rode the elevator to deliver takeout to their door. The clip drew more than three million views on TikTok.

For foreign visitors, these are travel novelties. In China's trade statistics, they are the visible edge of a much larger economy of services.

Figures released by the Ministry of Commerce show that in the first seven months of 2026, China's trade in services totaled 4.45 trillion yuan (about $656 billion), up 8.3% year on year. Services exports grew 17.1% to 1.77 trillion yuan, outpacing import growth of 3.2%. The structure is shifting as well: knowledge-intensive services exports rose 12.2% to 948.3 billion yuan, accounting for more than half of total services exports.

Zheng Wei, an associate research fellow at the China Outsourcing Institute, noted that knowledge-intensive services topping half of exports signals a shift toward higher value-added, knowledge and technology-intensive trade.

Much of that growth is now unfolding far beyond China's borders.

Chinese AI, running worldwide

Travel and transport may be the most familiar face of services trade, but much of China's export growth is now coming from knowledge-intensive sectors – AI models, computing power and smart education – that overseas users encounter in their own work and daily lives.

Chinese large language models are among the most heavily used in the world. According to data from OpenRouter, a global AI model aggregation platform, Chinese models logged 79.41 trillion token calls in a single week in early May, the highest of any country. On the open-source platform Hugging Face, China has become the largest source of model downloads. A Singapore-based engineer fine-tuned a popular Southeast Asian language model using Alibaba's open-source Qwen, and companies from Southeast Asia to the Middle East now use Chinese models for translation and content generation.

The computing power behind those models is itself becoming an export. In Shantou, a coastal city in south China's Guangdong Province, a pilot program delivers AI inference services to enterprises across Southeast Asia through dedicated cross-border data lines. Daily token calls there climbed from 100 million in late April to 10 billion within a month.

Chinese services are also entering classrooms overseas. In March, iFlytek signed a strategic agreement with Indonesia's Sinar Mas Group to support the digital transformation of the country's education system, which serves more than 50 million students but faces a shortage of some 1.3 million teachers. At a pilot school in Jakarta, teachers are already using AI-powered blackboards that turn complex lessons into animated illustrations.

The world meets in Beijing

These threads – digital convenience at home, expanding exports of knowledge-intensive services abroad – converge this week in Beijing. The 2026 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) will run from September 9 to 13 in Beijing, with 90 countries and regions and international organizations hosting exhibitions and events. More than 1,800 enterprises will exhibit on-site, 456 of them Fortune 500 companies or industry leaders. Nearly 100 forums and conferences are scheduled, along with over 100 matchmaking and promotion events and the release of new research reports on trade in services.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will co-host the Global Trade in Services Summit with China's Ministry of Commerce and the Beijing municipal government, WIPO's first time in that role. Norway, this year's guest country of honor, will stage a national pavilion showcasing its signature industries and innovations. The fair will also debut dedicated zones for overseas expansion services, where professional institutions in finance, law, accounting and intellectual property will hold more than 40 roadshows for companies going global.

Financial technology, digital health care and smart education are among the fair's focus areas, the same fields in which drones now deliver dinners in Shenzhen and AI blackboards stand in Jakarta classrooms.

Back in the Shenzhen park, Pérez concluded his account with a prediction: the technological innovations he witnessed overhead "may soon fly over a Western city." Later this week, many of the people building them will be in Beijing.