Powered by 16 mini-motors, a silvery robot dog is running on a table. It can express its "emotions" -- when you touch it gently, it will wag its tail to show its happiness and if you ignore it, the dog will bark fiercely or whimper.

That is not the AIBO robotic dog made by Japanese electronic giant Sony Corp. It is an Aisaibi robotic dog produced by Yinhui Toys Co. Ltd of Dongguan, south China's Guangdong Province, and it costs less than one quarter of the Japanese version.

Fang Gongfa, market supervisor of Yinhui, said his company exported 200,000 of the Aisaibi robots this year, which are well received overseas.

China produces 70 percent of the toys in the world. In Guangdong alone, there are 6,000 toy-making businesses which employ 1.5 million workers. The output value of these businesses was estimated to hit 35.7 billion yuan (about 4.3 billion US dollars), with the exports close to 3.8 billion US dollars in 2002,said Li Zhuoming, deputy head of the Guangdong Provincial Toys Association.

Out of the toys exported, intelligent ones are taking up an increasingly bigger share, said Li, who noted with improved quality, the profit from the comparatively big exporting volume of toys is not as high as expected because these products are mostly produced according to supplied designs from overseas.

Li stressed the necessity of developing China's own toy brands and scientific contents of such commodities. To this end, a professional scientific and technological committee was set up late last year under the Guangdong Provincial Toys Association, with Li at the head.

Li added that they are considering building a toy research and development center and a professional toy education network in cooperation with a number of top Chinese universities of engineering, science and technology.