A visitor experiences drone delivery by VR set at the booth of JD. com during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the United States, Jan. 9, 2019. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Chinese companies, a major force in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in past years, are less eager to attend the global electronics exhibition this year amid the protracted China-US trade war as well as an intensifying technology race between the world's two largest economies.

Space booked by Chinese companies at the annual show, which is scheduled to run from Tuesday to Friday (US time), is projected to be down by 5-6 percent compared with 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing event organizers.

A total of 1,097 Chinese companies were listed in the 2020 directory on the official website as of press time, down from more than 1,200 last year, the first drop in at least four years. In 2018, the number was 1,551, according to official figures and media reports.

Chinese companies including technology giant Alibaba and ZTE, the Shenzhen-based telecommunications equipment manufacturer, don't appear in this year's directory.

Huawei Device Co, a unit of Huawei Technologies, is among the Chinese companies that did sign up for the CES this year. The company did not respond to a request seeking comments.

A source close to a Chinese e-commerce platform told the Global Times on Monday on condition of anonymity that some Chinese companies dropped the idea of going to the US for the show around the middle of 2019 when they were asked about plans to attend. At that time, the China-US trade war was escalating.

The tensions also crippled the convenience of getting a visa to the US, according to industry insiders.

A person close to one of the state-owned mobile carriers told the Global Times that he felt it was "disgusting" during last year's visa application process when employees of his company faced delays, only to get their visas after the show wrapped up.

"They presume we are there to 'steal' their technology, so we did not sign up this year," the person said.

China's Ministry of Commerce issued a notice on Friday on how Chinese exhibitors should deal with possible disputes over intellectual property (IP) to protect their own interests.

The ministry, together with the Consulate-General of China in San Francisco and China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, will establish an IP services stand at this year's CES to help Chinese companies handle accusations by US companies via new legal means.

The US government crackdown on Huawei and other Chinese technology firms, may have discouraged some Chinese companies from attending the CES, analysts said.

Fang Xingdong, founder of Beijing-based technology think tank ChinaLabs, said on his Weibo account that it seems Chinese companies and attendees at this year's CES are likely to plunge in number. It is difficult to recall the days when Chinese flew to the US to visit Chinese exhibitors' booths.

The electronics show, with more than five decades of history, seems to have become lackluster as Chinese companies have tapped into more global expos and various channels to promote their technologies and products in overseas markets, Liu Dingding, a Beijing-based industry analyst, told the Global Times on Monday.

Liu predicted that global leading technology shows are likely to emerge in Southeast Asia in the future instead of the developed economies of North America and Europe, where Chinese technology companies generally found it harder to enter.

"It is foreseeable that competition between China and the US in the high-tech sector would become fiercer in 2020 along with China's shift toward its self-developed technology ecosystem," Liu noted.

"Chinese companies will be committed to opening up and the US tech crackdown will only encourage Chinese companies to perform better," Zou Pengcheng, chief technology officer of Chinese AI start-up Thundersoft Technology Co, told the Global Times. The company will attend this year's CES. 

"Technology cannot be developed by a single nation. The more closed the US is, the more open will China be," he added.