This year’s Lunar New Year Gala turned China’s most-watched cultural stage into a showcase for humanoid robotics, as machines performed comedy beats, martial-arts sequences and backstage chores alongside veteran artists. State media and participating companies framed the appearances not as stunts but as evidence that “embodied intelligence” — physical robots driven by sophisticated control, perception and large-model software — is transitioning from research novelty to commercial reality.
On-screen highlights included a bionic humanoid partnering with actress Cai Ming in a comedy sketch, a robot executing a martial-arts routine described as “silky,” and another machine reciting lines and folding clothes on stage. The performances were paired with technical claims: one firm says it embedded 32 actuators inside a biomimetic facial skin to produce nuanced expressions; another credits a joint-servo system and center-of-gravity algorithms for achieving what it calls the world’s first side aerial flip by a humanoid; a third company announced a massive embodied-intelligence dataset and an end-to-end large model it calls “Galaxy Star Brain.”
Those incremental advances matter because embodied intelligence — the coupling of large models with sensors, actuators and motion control — is what bridges abstract AI capabilities and real-world tasks. Facial expressiveness, dynamic balance and task-oriented datasets are each a necessary piece: the first improves human-robot interaction and stage presence, the second unlocks mobility and agility for practical environments, and the third fuels training of integrated models that can map perception to action.
The Gala plays a distinctive role in China’s innovation narrative. As a national cultural event with huge domestic and global viewership, it offers firms a rare combination of mass-market exposure and implicit state endorsement. That visibility accelerates consumer interest and procurement enquiries, squeezes development timelines and heightens expectations that robotics will deliver tangible products and services in areas from entertainment to logistics and elder care.
Commercially, the display underscores how Chinese robotics startups are packaging hardware, control software and large-scale data as integrated offerings. Building a “billion-scale” embodied dataset and an end-to-end model signals a move toward platform strategies: vendors that control data pipelines and model stacks can monetize both robots and recurring software services, while lowering costs for downstream adopters.
At the same time, spectacle and claims invite skeptical questions. Demonstrations under controlled stage conditions do not guarantee robustness in cluttered homes, factories or public spaces. Safety, reliability, long-term maintenance, and the economics of deploying humanoids beyond showrooms remain open issues. There are also governance concerns: as robots gain agility and autonomy, regulators will face pressure to update standards for testing, privacy, dual-use risks and workplace displacement.
For global observers, the Gala is a useful data point: China’s robotics ecosystem is maturing across multiple dimensions — mechanics, control, datasets and models — and is increasingly comfortable presenting those capabilities to mass audiences. The next tests will be scale, real-world performance and the ability to convert public fascination into sustainable markets and standards that ensure safe, beneficial deployment.