The recently concluded Humanoid Robot Games, a three-day event in Beijing, brought together over 500 humanoid robots, built by 192 universities and 88 private companies, representing 280 teams from 16 countries. The robots competed in a variety of sports and other challenges to showcase global innovations in AI and robotics. Held in one of the same stadiums used for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, this soft-power spectacle also highlighted how China is using its massive investments in embodied AI to adapt to changing demographics at home and to compete with the U.S. in shaping the future of technology.
In addition to the Humanoid Robot Games, China has also hosted the World Artificial Intelligence Conference and the World Robot Conference over the past few months. In April, Beijing held a half-marathon in which humans competed alongside humanoid robots. In March, China Media Group hosted the world’s first humanoid robot boxing competition. During China’s televised 2025 Spring Festival Gala in January, AI-powered humanoid robots performed choreographed dance routines.
Spectacles such as these can serve the Chinese government’s external propaganda objectives, as China Media Project stated earlier this year: “The objective is simple tech showmanship, advertising China’s supposed technological prowess in newly attractive ways, both to Chinese and to audiences overseas.” Similarly, the opening ceremony of the Games this month featured “robots wearing Labubu lucky charms, a full robot band, tiny robots dancing alongside human children, a robot fashion parade, and panda robots demonstrating martial arts,” as Mashable reported. An article from Xinhua noted that according to Zhou Changjiu, president of the RoboCup Asia-Pacific Confederation and one of the co-organizers of the Games, “the games served as both a platform and a showcase, demonstrating to the world China’s advantages in the humanoid robotics sector from the industrial chain and robot hardware to a large user base.”
Chinese media highlighted the success of Chinese teams at the Games. As the South China Morning Post reported, Hangzhou-based Unitreee won a total of 11 medals, including four golds, and X-Humanoid took home 10 medals with two golds. The Global Times wrote, “In 5v5 football final, Tsinghua University’s Hephaestus team defeated Germany’s HTWK Robotics+Nao Devils 1-0 to claim the title, while China Agricultural University Mountain & Sea team secured the 3v3 football championship.” (This success contrasts with China’s men’s football team, which to the frustration of many fans, continues to struggle in international tournaments.) Amy Hawkins at The Guardian described how events such as the Humanoid Robot Games reflect the intensifying, high-stakes technological competition between China and its Western rivals:
[AI] technology has become a lightning rod for relations between the two countries. And while the US still has the lead on frontier research, owing in part to Washington’s restrictions on the export of cutting-edge chips to China, Beijing is going all-in on real life applications, such as robotics.
Several cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have established 10bn yuan (£1bn) robotics industry funds. In January, the state-owned Bank of China announced plans for a 1tn yuan of financial support to the AI industry over the next five years.
“If there is an area where [Beijing] thinks that China is ahead, or could be positioned as a world leader, then they really want to draw attention to that area,” said Dr Kyle Chan, a researcher at Princeton University.
[…] When it comes to humanoids, the Chinese industry has many advantages. Although US companies such as Tesla and Boston Dynamics are still seen as the overall market leaders, several Chinese firms such as UBTech and Unitree Robotics – which supplied the boxing robots in Friday’s games – are catching up.
Tesla relies on China for many of the parts needed to build the company’s physical humanoids. The US investment bank Morgan Stanley estimates that China-based supply chains produce robots at a third of the cost of non-China suppliers. “It appears to be very difficult to entirely decouple from China in this space,” wrote Sheng Zhong, the bank’s head of China industrials research, in a recent note. [Source]
The design of the Games went beyond mere sports to showcase how humanoid robots could be integrated into society for utilitarian purposes. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the competition included numerous menial jobs, such as throwing away pieces of trash and dragging suitcases in a mock hotel room, and moving boxes of medicine in a mock pharmacy. These tasks reflect the Chinese government’s hope that robots might eventually be used to address labor shortages due to China’s shrinking workforce and provide care for its aging population.
Enormous investments underpin these government ambitions. Earlier this year, China’s National Development and Reform Commission announced a state-backed venture capital fund focused on robotics and AI, which is expected to attract nearly one trillion yuan ($138 billion) over 20 years. Citing more figures, Vincent Fagot and Jordan Pouille from Le Monde described how China is developing a growing global lead in the production and deployment of robotics, including humanoid robots:
In 2024, two-thirds of all global robotics patent filings came from China. That same year, the country became the world’s leading producer of industrial robots (“robotic arms”), and by far the largest purchaser, accounting for 54% of all robots installed globally in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics. The market is currently worth approximately $20 billion (€17.1 billion) and could surpass $50 billion by 2032, according to US consulting firm Fortune Business Insights.
But China wants more. The country is now accelerating in humanoid and quadruped robotics, developing ever more advanced models – and, crucially, producing them on a mass scale at prices up to 10 times lower than Japanese or American competitors. This year, the conference showcased more than 100 humanoid robot models, compared with 27 in 2024.
The stakes are indeed enormous. In a study published in May, research teams from US bank Morgan Stanley estimated the humanoid robot market could reach $5 trillion by 2050, with more than one billion human-shaped machines in service. According to the bank, 90% of them would likely perform simple, repetitive tasks, mainly for industrial and commercial purposes. China is expected to have the largest share: about 300 million, compared to 77 million in the United States. [Source]
Other examples beyond the realm of competitions demonstrate China’s advancements in the deployment of humanoid robots. This summer, the Shanghai Theatre Academy enrolled a humanoid AI robot in a doctoral program for drama and film studies. Earlier this month, Beijing unveiled the world’s first “Robot Mall,” a four-storey commercial center dedicated entirely to the sale of various types of robots, including humanoid robots. And as Sixth Tone reported this week, Chinese researchers have deployed a robot antelope to collect first-hand data about migration routes of Tibetan antelope on the Tibetan plateau. The robot has real antelope fur and a structure that mimics the antelope’s skeletal structure in order to “[allow] the imposter to blend seamlessly into the herd and [enable] close-range recording of video, sound, and other data.”
Alan Fern, a robotics professor at Oregon State University, told The New York Times that the Humanoid Robot Games helped to “give the public a realistic impression of where things really are,” and added that despite their feats, “[t]he robots are still dumb.” Indeed, these technological strides were not without setbacks and risks. Not only did many robots stumble and fall, but during a race, one of China’s Unitree robots also plowed into a human operator and knocked him to the ground. Coincidentally, the South China Morning Post published an article this week about how Chinese surgeons saved a patient who was nearly beheaded by a robotic arm, without explaining any background to the incident.
Given its rapid pace of deploying AI-powered robots, China will be a testing ground for how humans fare in a society in which they are no longer omnipotent. This was among the questions posed by Fan Yang at the end of an article she published last week in the Made in China Journal about drones and the “low-altitude economy” in Shenzhen. China’s megacities such as Shenzhen are being reconfigured through the deployment of AI-powered robot drones in order to meet shifting economic dynamics, such as growing demand for faster delivery orders, thereby transforming the nature of the urban environment:
The celebration of DJI’s ‘human-less machine’ as a pioneer figure in the low-altitude economy also points to the recognition that more-than-human capabilities are needed to manage this ‘archetype of new-quality productive forces’ (新质生产力) (Lü, R. 2024). To that end, IDEA launched the ‘Open SILAS (Smart Integrated Lower Airspace System)’ to ‘connect numerous cities, organizations, and businesses to collectively create a system of standards’ that can be applied nationally in the future. The hope is to mobilise artificial intelligence and related technologies to address the traffic that might ensue when the low-altitude economy scales up to a high degree of heterogeneity, density, frequency, and complexity (Xinhua Insight 2024). Again, as Li Shipeng mentions in an interview with the People’s Daily, Shenzhen’s ‘many years of accumulation and sedimentation in the fields of electronic information, big data, artificial intelligence, etcetera’ have granted the city ‘a unique advantage’ (Lü, S. 2024).
[… But h]ow might the aspirations for the more-than-human haunt the (differently classed and gendered) humans who remain trapped in the (dehumanising) systems of industrial, platform, and infrastructural capitalism? [Source]
