A dumpling shop becomes a poster child of AI adoption in China
Business owner quotes Deng Xiaoping as motivator: “Science and technology are a primary productive force.”
If you have an AI agent, you can tell it to build a website, make a slideshow, or get you a table at a popular dumpling shop in Beijing.
The dumpling shop, called Jinguyuan, has made headlines in China for creating a “skill” that allows users to check out the menu, seek recommendations, or join the queue by talking to their personal AI agents, tools that can automatically carry out tasks on a phone or laptop. Skills are files that teach AI agents specific workflows.
The shop owner, 41-year-old Li Bo, told me he built the AI skill in April, as he witnessed the growing popularity of agentic AI tools. Li began envisioning a world where everybody asks their AI assistant to plan daily work and life, including what to eat. Li wanted his dumpling shop to be part of that future.
“Science and technology are a primary productive force,” Li told me, quoting China’s late leader Deng Xiaoping, who unleashed the historic reforms in 1978 that led to the country’s economic miracle in the following decades. “You always need to surround yourself with the most advanced productive force.”
[In China] everyone is eager to adopt AI, seeing it as an inevitable way forward.
When I speak with people living in China, I find many are similarly worried about AI’s impact on the job market and the tech industry’s exploitative nature, but at the same time, everyone is eager to adopt AI, seeing it as an inevitable way forward.
Crash courses on large language models flourish online. Office workers rush to experiment with new AI tools to avoid falling behind in the competitive job market. When the agentic tool OpenClaw went viral, people queued up to have it installed on their laptops. A 2025 survey by public opinion firm Ipsos found that among the 30 countries surveyed, the Chinese population expressed the highest level of excitement about AI.
Li studied telecommunications engineering at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. After graduating with a master’s degree in 2010, instead of becoming an engineer like many of his classmates, he worked at hostels, peddled homemade desserts, and eventually partnered with a dumpling chef to open Jinguyuan near his alma mater, serving students and tech workers.
Li admits his AI skill brings more media attention than actual usage, but he is proud of becoming a role model for AI adoption. “Someone needs to start using it, even when it’s not that good,” Li said. “When steam engines just came out, people joked that they were not as good as horses. But in the end, cars won out.”
