Humans vs robots? China begs to disagree

The 2026 Spring Festival Gala, one of the world’s most-watched television events, featured a dazzling array of humanoid robots. They performed martial arts, executed intricate sword dances and even took part in a comedy skit alongside human celebrities.While parts of the world still view humanoid robots with a mixture of fear and suspicion, as potential job-stealers or sci-fi villains, China is increasingly embracing them as partners in work, entertainment and daily life. Amid the escalating artificial intelligence (AI) race, China is not just competing on technological prowess but is rapidly outpacing others in its willingness to integrate these machines into public life.China accounted for 90 per cent of the roughly 13,000 humanoid robots shipped globally last year. The country also represented over half of the humanoid robot exhibitors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2026. This burgeoning ecosystem draws researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs and investors into a fast-growing market.It is fuelled by a parallel explosion in large language models and multi-modal AI, from ByteDance’s Doubao to the DeepSeek and Qwen models. Such AI models help robots understand user requests, engage in conversation, analyse data and provide useful content. As more robots are deployed in the physical world, the AI models are enhanced by the influx of real-world data, which in turn intensifies competition in large language models themselves and further encourages innovation.The gala offered a stunning showcase of this progress. Robots from companies like Unitree, Galbot and Noetix ran, danced and performed acrobatics on stage. One might dismiss a backflipping robot, clad in a Monkey King costume, as a spectacle. But the nimbleness of the arms, legs, waist, neck, ankles and fingers shows technological breakthroughs.Making body components that are flexible requires joint stability, space sensing and navigation, computer vision accuracy and skeleton durability. It demands seamless coordination between what Chinese engineers describe as the robot’s big brain – the higher-level AI for self-learning, planning and decision-making – and its small brain, which handles the movement and motor control needed for everything from walking and running to complex dexterous functions.