Afra: …In China, [OpenClaw’s] popularity has far outstripped anything seen in the US. Tencent and Baidu organized OpenClaw configuration workshops in Shenzhen that drew retirees and students alike; developer meetups in Beijing sold out instantly; China’s daily token consumption has surpassed 140 trillion — more than a thousandfold increase from the 100 billion daily tokens of early 2024. According to cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard, China has now overtaken the US in OpenClaw adoption. So how did this happen?
Du Lei: …There’s a structural reason for this. In Silicon Valley, OpenClaw’s arrival didn’t produce any cognitive shock — because it emerged from a complete evolutionary sequence. We’d already had Devin, various agent frameworks, and a step-by-step progression of Claude and other tools steadily advancing in capability. OpenClaw felt like a natural next layer — a more flexible agentic glue. Most of what it enables, people in the Valley had already approximated six months earlier through other means. Exciting, yes. Directionally significant, yes. But perceived as an organic next step within a familiar lineage.
In China, that entire year of evolution had essentially not happened. The domestic conversation had stayed at the level of “how do I use AI to break down a PowerPoint” — consumer entertainment tracks like image and video generation, extremely sophisticated in their own right, but irrelevant to anyone who needed AI to actually assist with work, anyone who needed a genuine intelligent agent.
So when OpenClaw arrived in China, it compressed an entire year of product evolution into a single moment. The final exam answers appeared on the table overnight. OpenClaw settled the debt that the domestic AI productivity track had been accumulating for a year — all at once, in one decisive strike.
Hua Han: On the supply side: every model company has enormous incentive to accelerate this. AI capability has climbed in distinct steps — first ChatGPT-style single-turn conversation; then reasoning models, where thinking time extended but the interaction remained fundamentally one-shot; then Claude Code and open computer use, where single interaction is no longer the design target and multi-turn, long-horizon task collaboration becomes the paradigm, with token consumption rising exponentially. For model companies, this is an enormous business — their entire imperative is to sell tokens.
Shenzhen is home to vast numbers of hardware and model companies. Every laptop or phone that ships with an OpenClaw client pre-installed becomes a persistent token consumption entry point. Token-maxxing, from a pure business logic standpoint, is entirely rational for every model vendor.
Afra: I have my own theory as well. A lot of local governments in China are desperately hungry for new tech narratives right now. Against the backdrop of economic slowdown and high youth unemployment, keywords like “digital nomad” and “open source” have become the latest in a string of buzzwords that local governments race to adopt. From Liangzhu and Anji in Hangzhou to Huangshan in Anhui, cities and towns are competing to attract AI digital nomads. Local governments are anxiously latching onto each new narrative, trying to shore up their talent pipelines and fiscal resources.
Hua Han: From the user side too, the appeal is real. OpenClaw is a genuine productivity tool. Chinese corporate culture — whether in state enterprises or major internet companies — is notoriously process-heavy. Even if you’re already cycling through DingTalk and Feishu (China’s Slack) all day, a tool that can actually automate your routine work has authentic pull for ordinary users.
OpenClaw adoption incentives: