Abstract: How to cultivate new competitive advantages in foreign trade and get rid of the dilemma of low or negative growth in export trade is the focus and difficult point of China's foreign trade work at present. Based on the data of the International Robotics Federation and data of Chinese customs from 2006 to 2016, this paper explores the impact of industrial robot applications on the scale and structure of China's exports. The findings show that industrial robot applications have significantly promoted urban export growth, and this promotion effect is mainly manifested in the quantity margin, while the price and expansion margins do not change significantly. Robots indirectly act on urban export growth by attracting the inflow of high-skilled labor and promoting the transfer of capital across regions. Robot applications promote the export growth of China's processing trade and general trade, and by significantly increasing the high-tech products export share to achieve technology structure optimization of export products; but its effect on export market structure adjustment still needs to be stimulated. Considering the inter-city correlation of production factors, robot applications have inhibited export expansion in the neighboring citieswhilepromoting the local urban export growth, so there is a siphon effect; however, in general, robot applications have significantly boosted China's export growth. The findings imply that the robot dividend can replace the demographic dividend and create new growth points for China's export trade, but the government should pay more attention to the coordinated development of regional foreign trade when introducing relevant policies, and beware of robot applications further widening the regional gap in the development of foreign trade.

Key words: industrial robots, export scale, export structure, flow of production factor, siphon effect