The DJI issue is now a 23-minute audio portrait .
THE CLEVER MOVE Every month, Inside China AI takes one theme and tries to show how China is building it differently. This month it was Physical AI — the idea that China’s edge isn’t in the lab, it’s in deployed machines accumulating real-world hours at a scale no Western competitor has matched. We looked at the framework, the sectors, the companies. Now we go deeper. Once a month, we take one company that makes the argument concrete. Not a profile. A portrait — of the technology decision, the market timing, the organizational gamble that, in retrospect, made everything else possible. This month, the company is DJI. It is the most complete example we have of what Physical AI looks like when it actually works — and the story starts with a helicopter that wouldn’t leave the ground.
