Ten intelligent robots have started to work as customs officers at three ports in the cities of Zhuhai and Zhongshan, southern China’s Guangdong Province on Saturday, according to the local customs office.

My friend Yegor Belkov has posted this news on socil media and I think it is a verybijteresting example on innovation in the field of Customs.


They are the first batch of intelligent robots, to be used by Chinese customs at the ports of Gongbei, Hengqin and Zhongshan. The robots, named Xiao Hai, have state-of-the-art perception technology and are able to listen, speak, learn, see and walk.


Based on a specialized customs database, the robots can answer questions in 28 languages and dialects, including Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Japanese.

There are some particular problems they cannot solve, and customs officials said they will link the robots to their customer service hotline in the future.


With face recognition technology, the robots can detect suspicious people and raise an alarm, according to Zhao Min, director of Gongbei customs.

Here is an article about the from China Daily: Robot Customs Officers

Cities are economic and political powerhouses. The GDP of the state of New York is larger than that of Spain or South Korea. In Latin America, São Paulo state alone is richer than Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia combined. Guangdong in China is wealthier than Russia or Mexico.

More than a deliberate choice, paradiplomacy is becoming an inevitable move.


Cities and states manage their own diplomatic networks. Critics assume that only regions that flirt with sovereignty are induced, by the nature of their internal struggles, to establish representations abroad. It’s true that Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland boast the widest and better-resourced diplomatic networks.

However, an increasing number of local governments have also seen the need to open representations in foreign countries to protect and advance their specific interests. For Canadian provinces, US states or German länder, this is a common foreign policy instrument.

Cities and states are also members of international organizations. There are approximately 125 multilateral arrangements of subnational governments.

These arrangements are growing at a rate that far exceeds the establishment of conventional national-state international organizations.

This is a very interering development that will bring a new paradigm and dimension to international cooperation creating  new opportunities. 

Read the interesting article here: WEF: Article
Source: World Economic Forum

I was delighted to get the monthly September statistics for this blog, ‘CapacityNow’ www.larskarlsson.com. 

September was anothet fantastic month with 13.887 visitors!


I can only say that it is absolutely amazing that so many people visited my blog last month. 

These visitors came from more than 70 different countries. 


Thank you for reading my blog! Welcome back this month.