Norinco has been cloning and selling American designs on the international market for decades. In the United States, the company is banned because it tried to sell guns directly to gangs in the 1990s.

The same year, Norinco spent 1.5 billion yuan (US$228 million) setting up a company in Shanghai to build a nationwide location service platform and develop technical standards for the Beidou system.

Norinco’s first-generation exoskeleton had a top speed of 2.8 miles per hour, for 12 miles. They say this new version improves on that, but doesn’t say by how much.