New Delhi, Sept. 9 -- CHINA'S LEADERS rarely namecheck individual companies. It is rarer still for them to talk up a group's valuation while it prepares a highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO). That did not stop Li Qiang, the country's premier, from recently mentioning Unitree, a robotics firm, and the explosion in its valuation from 10m yuan to 42bn yuan ($6bn) in a decade.

Unitree, which on July 2nd received approval to list, is just one of thousands of companies behind the Communist Party's plan to take the lead in a long list of frontier technologies over the next decade, from artificial intelligence and humanoid robots to fusion power and digital brain implants. The businesses behind these technologies now need copious am...